Yeah I read their update and gotta say most of it actually sounds pretty good, the stuff they are working on. Seems Halo 1A, 2A, and possibly 3 are all up and running, and they got some improvements coming for menus, settings, and other stuff. They said Halo 4 and ODST are still a ways out, but they seem confident that those will release in 2020 as well. So they plan to get the entire rest of MCC out within the next year? Be interesting to see if they can deliver. I was mainly interested in Reach and ODST. So Halo 1 Anniversary is next huh? I still enjoy the Gearbox port of Halo 1 on PC, and I did get to play Halo 1 Anniversary on X360 in co-op a couple times or so. The new visuals were interesting, though I was fine with the old graphics and art. In some cases the new assets and effects do make the environments more immersive and provide more atmosphere, like the swamp area in the level where you first discover The Flood. I liked the lighting improvements too. I did not get to try the MCC version of Halo 1 Anniversary on XB1, which I heard runs at 60fps. Well hopefully soon we'll be able to check it out on PC. Halo 3 will have taken longer than Reach did to come to PC.
I was recently gifted MCC on Steam, and I played through Halo Reach's campaign, and also did some online Firefight and Slayer/Team Slayer (all before the first patch that was released on Dec. 18). I used to play Halo Reach a lot back on X360 with friends and homeys from work. I never could stand playing FPS games on consoles. I've done it way more than I've ever expected to, and I never could progress past the point where it looks like a toddler is the one doing the aiming. Never feels right, and feels too limiting. Collectively I've played all the Halo games to death on various generations of Xbox consoles. I do own Gearbox's Halo 1 port on PC, and while I did get a chance to play through the horrid WinVista GFWL port of Halo 2 (which thankfully is now covered by Halo 2 Project Cartographer on PC, which I also played through), most of my Halo experience has been on consoles. Many hours of it. Hours of suffering. I grew up a multiplatformer gamer. Long have I been a dweller and explorer of the 3 corners of the video game world: arcade, PC, and home/handheld console. I have no problem using a controller when the right game calls for it. First person shooters most definitely aren't those games.
I've been through Reach several times on X360, once solo and multiple times in co-op. Playing it on PC was like I finally, truly, got to play the game for the first time. At long last. No more using my imagination. A decade after release, I can finally use a mouse and keyboard to play this game. I was not disappointed with the experience. The gameplay has really opened up for me. Armed with a mouse, more of the weapons have become fully available to me, such as the DMR and sniper rifle. With a controller I won't attempt to snipe, and the advantages of various Halo series weapons such as the DMR, battle rifle, carbine, and needler rifle are lost to me. I wonder if Halo MCC on XB1 supports mouse and keyboard now. I had heard some XB1 games were actually going to do that. Not sure if any did. Oh, and it was nice not having to deal with Halo Reach's low res on X360 and the oppressive TAA the game used. While the age of the graphical assets can clearly be seen, Bungie's original art direction still holds up very well. Some scenes look fantastic. Some of the skyboxes were impressive. The game cleaned up pretty dang nicely, I gotta say.
I kept the game locked to 60fps via VSYNC, cuz I heard the game gets really wonky and can partially break at very high framerates. I didn't mind. 60fps was plenty good enough for me. I had to spend a lot of time playing the game at 30fps and below on X360. 60fps is more than good enough for letting me focus on finally playing this game with a proper control scheme. Ran the game at 4K (using nVidia DSR for 3840x2400 in my case). The game's default FoV was 78, I had to jack it up to about 90. Not sure I'll leave it there or go higher, but so far it seems pretty good. I see they plan to bring some PC features like FoV sliders to console, interesting. Such things would be most welcome there too. There have been times over the years when I was playing a console game and wish they had at least some of the options I was used to seeing on PC.
Like it seems most people reported, I too was experiencing strange audio issues. Nothing serious enough to ever really get in the way. I'd notice but just keep right on playing. Seems 343i is still trying to get a handle this one. I didn't experience any of the stuttering issues on my PC, but when playing the game on a friend's X570 system with Ryzen 2700X and Radeon 5700 XT at 2560x1440 (running from an NVMe drive), there was serious stuttering if you capped the game to 60fps using the in-game limiter. Couldn't cap using VSYNC because that particular display is a 144 Hz display (well I guess we could have set the monitor's refresh rate to 60 Hz but eh). I'm running the game from a SATA SSD. 343i said in that post that the stuttering has been a hard one for them to lock down, so they're still investigating. They recommend disabling 3rd party apps. I didn't have any issues myself when playing the game while MSI Afterburner+RivaTuner were running in the background. I didn't even know about issues with Menu performance until I read it in this post, so yeah those didn't crop up for me. The in-game VSYNC was working fine for me (didn't test GPU driver VSYNC) so no VSYNC issues either. Haven't had a chance to try co-op so can't comment on latency issues there. Seems people had issues with mouse input, I did not experience any myself.
Seems there is still a lot of work to be done, and more changes in store. 343i definitely seems to be keeping themselves busy. I wonder how large the MCC porting team is. I have to imagine most of 343i is working on Halo Infinite. The MCC PC porting team certainly has their work cut out for them. So far though, I gotta say, they seem to have done a pretty good job out the gate. Not bad at all. I played through Reach, didn't have any serious issues, game looked very sharp, clean, and detailed, and it ran great. I would've waited for a sale and until most of the games had been available before I made a purchase, but I'm glad I got to check out the game so soon thanks to a friend's generosity. Not a bad first effort for 343i with MCC on PC. Now we look to their efforts with Halo 1A. Though I feel they should first focus on the Halo games that are not available at all on PC in any form.
EDIT: Oh, and splitscreen please. That would be very nice to have too. If XB1 can do it, PC sure as **** can do it. Gears 4 had a good splitscreen mode on PC (haven't tried Gears 5 splitscreen). Serious Sam been had splitscreen. Hard to imagine Halo without splitscreen support (yes Halo 5, we're looking at you).
