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October 26, 2015
After the very poor launch of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, it's no surprise that the community's trust for 343 Industries has been a bit strained. Thankfully, Halo 5 Guardians released this week with relatively no troubles at all. Thanks to the beta events and the pre-release leading up to the full game release on October 27, there were no major server issues on day one.
Whilst there were a few server hiccups here and there, for the most part Halo 5 Guardians has been silky smooth on matchmaking. The same can be said for the rest of the game too - Halo 5 Guardians has a very sleek 60fps that is seen everywhere in the game. Resolution is 1080p at it's highest, but sometimes it is downscaled to ensure that the 60fps frame cap stays consistent at all times.
The matchmaking service has been working fine all week and the new Spartan CSR ranking system is working just as expected. Every single playlist has been playing out fine, including modes in Warzone and Arena.
For
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October 07, 2015
343 Industries, Mojang and 4JStudios have all teamed up together to create a themed Minecraft DLC pack for Minecraft on the Xbox One and Xbox 360. This isn't the first time we've seen themed mash up packs for Minecraft on the Xbox, and in fact it's not the first time we've seen a Halo pack either.
In the past we saw a full Minecraft Halo theme which included a Halo texture pack, Halo music track and Halo map. This time, 343 Industries has worked closely with Mojang to create a Halo 5: Guardians skin pack.
Starting on October 23, players will be able to purchase a skin pack for Minecraft that adds a number of Halo skins to the game. The Halo DLC pack will only be available on Xbox One and Xbox 360.
For those that have already purchased the previous Halo mashup pack, you'll be happy to hear that this upcoming skin DLC will be available to you for free. Everybody else can pick up both the mash-up pack and the now included skins for $4.
In total there are eight different
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October 05, 2015
Halo 5: Guardians will be getting a new clan system upon launch and players can already create their own clans and add their friends. The new clan system in Halo 5 is called Spartan Companies and each company can include up to 100 players.
As well as being an opportunity for players to create a social hub for communities and friends within Halo 5, Spartan Companies can be used to bring new players together. If you visit the Spartan Companies page you will find a list of all of the clans already created and it's possible to request invitations into these companies.
A player can only be in one company at once so players will have to remain loyal to their groups. As an added incentive to try out the Spartan Companies system, when a player joins a company for the first time, they will be rewarded a REQ pack with a guaranteed cosmetic item inside.
These REQ packs can of course not be used till Halo 5 is actually available and players can only gain 1 REQ pack from Spartan
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September 27, 2015
Halo: The Master Chief Collection will soon get an update that will finally add a system to punish quitters. As it currently stands, players can quit matchmaking games half way through with very little punishment which leaves games unbalanced and unfair, especially in team games.
Thankfully 343 Industries has nearly completed development for a system that will punish and discourage quitters. Unfortunately 343 didn't go into much detail about how the Master Chief Collection will punish quitting. Instead, a small blog post was listed to explain that the upcoming patch will "address a variety of areas, including ranking, will add new systems for quitting and penalties, and will improve a number of community items."
So far, 343 Industries has not set a release date for the changes, but it would be safe to say that the new changes will be released in a patch before the end of the year. Hopefully in between now and then we'll hear some further details about exactly how the quitting
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May 01, 2015
Halo has always been a big Xbox seller, so it's not really surprising that Microsoft and 343 Industries are planning to release a limited edition Halo 5 themed Xbox One console that will come with a copy of the upcoming game.
So far we have very few details about the limited edition Halo 5 console, although we know that it is definitely coming. The news was revealed on Twitter by Josh Holmes, the studio head for Halo 5: Guardians.
Details about the limited edition console are bound to come at some point closer to the release of Halo 5. We'll be able to find out about how much the Halo 5 themed console will cost and also what it will look like. It makes sense that the console will be available on the same day Halo 5: Guardians is, which is October 27. Pre-orders for the console should hopefully open a little earlier than October 27.
Two other limited edition versions of Halo 5: Guardians have already been confirmed, with details about those being more beefy. The first
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April 04, 2015
Some new playlist changes have gone ahead in anticipation for the launch of the April update for The Master Chief Collection. The playlist changes include the introduction of Team Doubles, as well as a few other changes across the board.
Team Doubles is a pretty popular playlist that has been around since Halo 2, and it includes a variety of different game modes that can be played with 2 players on each team. The new Team Doubles playlist in The Master Chief Collection will include Halo 2 Classic, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3 and Halo 4 maps.
Other changes include small tweaks to team sizes. For example, Combat Evolved team games now have 2 players on each team, instead of 2-3 players. 343 Industries have also been clear about their playlist plans for the future. The development team has revealed that they would like to add more playlists that give players a battle rifle at the start of the game, and they've expressed their interest in more team objective style playlists.
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February 28, 2015
So far, Halo 5 is actually looking to be a monster of a game, and thanks to Aaron Greenberg's latest comments in the Inner Circle podcast, we can get a better idea about just how huge the game is shaping up to be.
"Halo 5 is gonna be huge. It should be one of the biggest entertainment releases of the year if we do our job right. I think what we've got with Master Chief and Locke is a marketer's dream. The game is just super-innovative. I think this is a title that 343 has dreamed of making, and they're innovating in ways that our jaws are dropping."
"It's such a deep story. To me it's like the closest thing to playing in a real movie, you know. I love campaign. I play multiplayer and I enjoy it, but I just love to get deep in the campaign and co-op you know, and Halo was kind of the birth of that, and also at the same time has innovated the multiplayer, so I'm excited with what they're doing with Halo 5, and we'll be revealing more soon."
Interestingly, Greenberg spent
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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