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March 14, 2015
If you remember back to near when The Master Chief Collection was released, you may recall 343 Industries announcing that they will be releasing ODST as part of the collection to say sorry for the game's launch problems.
Even though we haven’t heard anything about the remastered version of ODST for a while now, 343 Industries haven't stopped developing it. In fact, a new blog post has just been put up on the 343 Industries blog, detailing their progress with the ODST game and the state of the Master Chief Collection.
Firstly, 343 Industries have revealed that there will be a new update in April that will further improve the game and fix any issues that are still plaguing the game. 343 Industries have also shown off two images. One shows ODST in all it's glory, and the other shows the new Halo 2 remake planned for The Master Chief Collection. The remake is Relic, and it should be coming alongside ODST.
Unfortunately 343 did not reveal when ODST or Relic will be released,
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January 17, 2015
A new patch was planned to roll out for the Master Chief Collection last week but it has since been delayed. The patch had been mentioned to include some fixes to matchmaking whilst adding some general tweaks to multiplayer, campaigns and interfaces.
Whilst 343 Industries failed to mention why the patch was delayed, they have since confirmed that the release of the patch has been pushed back till later this January. According to 343, the patch should be up and ready to install within the "next few days."
It's a shame that after all this time, the Master chief Collection is still not working 100% as planned, but 343 are still working on it.
The patch notes for the upcoming patch rolling out later this week can be read below.
Matchmaking:
Improved matchmaking search success rates.
Made an update to reduce instances of "Awaiting Privileges" matchmaking errors.
Made an update to ensure player counts more reliably match the expected numbers for each -
January 06, 2015
Whilst we all rightly presumed that the Master Chief Collection was going to be released with all of the content from previous games at launch, 343 Industries has been very far behind with development, due to server issues and other problems with the new Halo 2 anniversary multiplayer.
As a result, many in-game features and content of the Master Chief Collection has been unavailable since launch, including the Spartan Ops missions that were released as part of Halo 4.
The Spartan Ops missions were a set of in-game objectives that followed a set story and played out like the firefight game type in both Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST did. Unlike firefight, Spartan Ops were specially designed to delve into the story that took place whilst the Master Chief was floating about in space, and many players have complained that they are an incredibly important part of Halo 4.
Fortunately enough, 343 Industries have just launched Spartan Ops for the Master Chief Collection in a
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December 29, 2014
When the Master Chief Collection launched for the Xbox One, plenty of Halo fans were left devastated. Whilst 343 Industries did a spectacular job at delivering the new remastered content and graphics for the Master Chief Collection, it's online servers were plagued with problems, and most players had to week at least a week before they could play online properly.
Even then, there will still bugs, glitches and server problems, and most of the playlists were not even implemented at this point. Fortunately, 343 Industries have slowly been rolling out new fixes and extra content for the multiplayer portion of the Master Chief Collection, and this latest patch sees some much needed tweaks to the game bundle.
When you next get into the Master Chief Collection, a download will start for the newest update for the game. This new content patch has been focused exclusively on matchmaking online, and it's main feature adds new team balancing mechanics to the game.
343 Industries
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December 08, 2014
Although the Master Chief Collection has been filled with issues at launch, the new Halo 5: Guardians is still being worked on by 343 Industries, and they are getting ever closer to releasing the game.
Whilst for most of the development process 343 have been pretty quiet about Halo 5, we have seen an influx of new content recently, and just this week 343 released yet another gameplay video, showcasing the new multiplayer in action.
This time round, the gameplay lasts for 15 minutes and it shows off two full games of slayer. The first map is played on Empire, a map we have already seen in previous videos, whilst the second map is Crossfire, one that some of you may not have yet seen.
As always, Halo 5 is looking pretty good in this latest gameplay video, and the great lighting can be seen in full effect. One thing that is clear is that 343 have attempted to put a lot more emphasis into the power weapons in Halo 5, and a typical game of slayer will revolve more around
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May 27, 2014
Whilst 343 Industries are still working on the next Halo game for the Xbox One, they have also been working on something completely unexpected that many fans of the series may be looking forward to. This something has been named Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and it will be a bundle of games that features all four previous Halo titles that follow the story of the Master Chief.
This includes Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 4. Games such as Halo ODST, and Halo Reach will not be included in the bundle. According to rumors, all four games will also be 'remastered,' probably in a similar fashion to how Halo: Combat Evolved was remastered in the recent Halo anniversary release for the Xbox 360.
So far it's unclear how the multiplayer will work for this bundle, but it is expected that the Master Chief Collection will come with some kind of online multiplayer matchmaking. It's quite a big project to port all four games into one collection, and so far we aren't
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January 15, 2014
Halo 5 is-a-coming, but new information suggests that it may not be the only game 343 Industries and Microsoft Studios are working on right now. It's more than likely that early development processes for Halo 6 is already under way, but I'm talking about something entirely different, and it might not even be a cheap mobile game.
This information comes from 343 Industries very own website, where they have a new job listing that has some rather suspect details in. Here is a little cut out from the job listing.
"343 Industries is searching for a rock star engineer to join the team developing a new experience in the Halo universe. Work on one of the most exciting and creative intellectual properties in the industry; we are gathering an incredible team to help drive the future of Halo."
A new experience in the Halo universe suggests that this could be a completely brand new game - it's unlikely it's referring to Halo 5, because development for this game has been going
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September 08, 2013
Recently we discussed 343 Industries strange way of saying "This is the next Halo, but it isn't actually going to be called Halo 5." After this point a lot of us decided to go ahead and accept that the first Halo game on the Xbox One might not be called Halo 5.
No one is really bothered about such a trivial thing, but a new leaked trailer seems to show that the next game will in fact be called Halo 5. The trailer shown is the same one as before, however this time round it ends with a Halo 5 logo being shown.
The new trailer shown is made by the same animation studio, Axis Animation, as before. Axis Animation seemed to have just edited the previous version to add Halo 5 onto the ending cutscene, although there doesn't seem to be any real reason for it.
This leaked video could of perhaps been made before Microsoft decided to change the new Halo's name into something other than Halo 5.
Regardless of the name of the next Halo,
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July 13, 2013
343 Industries has announced a Brand new DLC bundle that will bag together a bunch of packs and allow you to get some brand new DLC content and help you to save a few MS.
The new Champions bundle will include the Steel Skin DLC pack, the Bullseye DLC pack and on top of those two, the Infinity Armor DLC pack.
For those that didn't know, the Steel Skin pack will add some new Armor Skins to the game for players to customize their Spartan, including the 'steampunk' paint jobs for UNSC, whilst the Infinity Armor pack will also add new customization options in the form of new armor items.
The Bullseye DLC pack will add two brand new multiplayer maps, and a new Spartan Armor and Gravball game named 'Ricochet.'
The new Champions DLC bundle will be out August 20 and will cost 800 MS points. Individually, the DLC packs add up to 960 MS points, so buying them in the new Champions bundle will save you some money.
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April 17, 2013
New Halo Ranking System
Competitive Skill Rank will be making its way to Halo 4 this week, and to help players get to grips with the new ranking system, 343 Industries has given some insight on Competitive Skill Rank and how it works.
The Halo 4 Competitive Skill Rank (CSR) will rank players from 1 to 50 based on the player's performance in multiplayer matches, as well as the rank of those you play with.
Everybody will start out with a rank of zero, and will be able to achieve higher ranks based on their performance. The CSR is also based individually on each playlist, similar to Halo 3's matchmaking system, meaning if you had a high