It's been nearly seven months since the troubled launch of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. November 11th 2014 marks the day that Halo fans everywhere were left out in the cold when the game hobbled out of the gate with serious functionality problems. While a number of other high profile releases shipped with nasty bugs, The Master Chief Collection is perhaps the most infamous of all.
It took a long time for the issues to be resolved, and 343 Industries attempted to smooth things over by offering early adopters a free copy of the Halo 3: ODST remaster as soon it was ready to launch. Six months after that announcement, the promised remaster is finally available for The Master Chief Collection, and with its release comes a new map and another round of changes and improvements.
Alvios Games discusses the titles that inspired Vellum, including Halo 3: ODST, Mass Effect 3, Hades, and Slay the Spire.
With its smooth jazz and iconic New Mombasa streets, we need Xbox's next Halo game to return to the remarkable world of Halo 3: ODST.
Gearshift Media has shared a demo of their Halo 3: ODST Fan Remake in Unreal Engine 5 that everyone can download.
Digital Foundry:
"ODST now utilises anisotropic filtering to a limited degree. We pegged it somewhere around 4x AF with some blurry textures still evident at oblique angles,"
"ODST retains the original Xbox 360 font and HUD assets resulting in blurry, upscaled text and UI elements."
"LOD pop-in"
"Unfortunately the desired 60fps isn't maintained as often as we'd like - a number of major fire-fights induce noticeable dips in performance that see the frame-rate dive into the mid-40s. This issue tends to crop up more regularly than it did in Halo 3 and definitely detracts from the presentation, especially when nearly every mission in the game features at least one area where performance is impacted."
"the Xbox and Xbox 360 versions of these games simply load faster"
"every title in the Master Chief Collection still exhibits frame-rate issues"
"Ultimately, Halo 3: ODST is a pretty solid port, with much improved image quality and performance that far exceeds the original release. The fact that it still dips in major confrontations is a disappointment, but it still winds up feeling a tad more polished than most of the other games in the collection."
An extra game for the collection is great. People with negative agendas will try to downplay this but the collection has been working for a while now months even. Sites like Neogaf are the worst offenders their negativity ruins gaming if you ask me.
Good to hear!!
But what of the other four games in the package then? Since the launch of the collection, patches have focused primarily on improving the game's networking and matchmaking deficiencies. We played a number of matches across various Halo titles over the past week and experienced relatively short waiting times ranging between 30 seconds to three minutes, as well as generally stable performance. We did encounter a couple of matches that ended prematurely and even a crash that required the game to be restarted but all in all, it's worlds beyond the situation late last year. There were additional hurdles when attempting to join games with a party but with a little patience, we were able to enjoy some cooperative action.
Asking around online for other user experiences we noted that in general, players are reporting reasonably smooth experiences with most issues centering on the party system
Bennibop@ I have the game by game sharing with a friend. The campaigns were working at lunch day one.
Online was broken because i tried to play online two weeks in and it was a mess. Tried a month later it was still broken. Around Feb thereabouts it improved a lot and has got better.
Four games with different multiplayers was never going to be easy. Halo 2 was an original xbox game. Matchmaking issues but how bad are? DF report is only minor stuff nothing major really!
So much content for 1 game lol, I haven't even gotten around to spartan ops yet. 5 campaigns,5 multiplayer engines, forge, spartan ops. Campaigns alone makes it worth it.
I must have bad eye sight (technically do lol) but I never noticed any stutter during my two run through. I only notice dips when 30fps games drop alot in a split second like 30 down to 20 at once. If a game is 60fps and drop down to 45 at once I wouldn't notice that why I find 60fps unnecessary. Just give me a locked 30 and I'm happy but apparently I'm alone with that.