Halo Halo: The Master Chief Collection

[Husky_Khan]

Apparently it collects the special editions of the first four Halo games into one MASTER CHIEF collection and its even available for PC. Has anyone delved into whether it's worth a buy or if it's just a cash grabbing collection of bad ports and barely there remasters and the like?

Halo Infinite review

Master Chief's long-awaited return comes frustratingly close to greatness.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Laskar]

Apparently it collects the special editions of the first four Halo games into one MASTER CHIEF collection and its even available for PC. Has anyone delved into whether it's worth a buy or if it's just a cash grabbing collection of bad ports and barely there remasters and the like?

Halo Infinite review

Master Chief's long-awaited return comes frustratingly close to greatness.

www.pcgamer.com

Well, all that's out so far is just Reach. The other games come later.

So far, I'm kind of split. It's nice to have Reach on the console, and I am looking forward to all the crazy shit the mod community is going to do with it. On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to modders making the game fun to play again.

Reach was built with a number of assumptions. Namely, it was built with the assumption that players would be sitting on a couch far away from the TV, and that they'd be using a controller with aim assist. The PC port completely defies those assumptions, so now the DMR is more broken than ever.

There's a big difficulty jump from Easy mode to Hard mode. Enemies become bullet sponges who laugh off automatic rifle fire. Movement is likewise spongey, and I don't get the same utility from armor abilities that I used to.

Visually, the game is still beautiful. There's some graphical artefacts and a missing texture on the backside of a building in Sword Base, but everything is so much clearer now. It makes me appreciate what a shitty TV I was playing on back in the early 2010s.

Overall, the Master Chief Collection is well worth the price. When it released five years ago, it was a broken, buggy mess. Microsoft could have thrown up its hands and abandoned the game, but they didn't. Years of work and gigabytes of patches later, the Master Chief Collection is actually a pretty good port. I recommend buying it and seeing what comes next.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

There's a big difficulty jump from Easy mode to Hard mode.

 

[Brutus]

I'm happy to say they fixed the damn Crouch bug in Halo Reach.
Halo CE has come out in the past month for MCC on steam.

 

[Husky_Khan]

The Master Chief Collection is currently on sale on Steam until April 6th for 20% off.

Save 75% on Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam

To play, purchase either Halo: the Master Chief Collection or individual DLC.For the first time, the series that changed console gaming forever comes to PC with six blockbuster games in one epic experience.

store.steampowered.com

 

[CarlManvers2019]

TBH from what I have heard, after Halo 3, most of them all go really down in quality

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

TBH from what I have heard, after Halo 3, most of them all go really down in quality

Correct!

 

[Brutus]

Halo reach is a horrible exercise in frustration on heroic difficulty. I would recommend the Mod Ruby's Rebalanced Reach campaign. Link goes to nexus mods. It simply rebalances the weapons and a few tweaks here and there so it feels like previous games. It goes from wanting to toss your computer out the window frustrating to hey this is actually fun.

Also if anyone is having issues with the Anti-Cheat stopping on an error, it might be your anti-virus software live protection.

 

[Brutus]

Halo 2 has been released on Steam.
To sum up Halo

 

[Duke Nukem]

The master chief collection is very good i would recommend getting it , halo 2 anniversary is my favorite so far.

 

[Duke Nukem]

Halo 5 was the first halo i played sadly, i thought it was an alright game , but after playing the older games i hate it now

 

[Laskar]

Halo 5 was the first halo i played sadly, i thought it was an alright game , but after playing the older games i hate it now

Eh. I've never played Halo 5, but I hear the gameplay is great.
Storywise, though, it doesn't hold up to the earlier games. It suffers from the common problem of a writing team leaving a franchise after all the main conflicts have been resolved, and then the story flails wildly about after a new team is brought in with no clear idea of where to take the story from here.

 

[Alaric Volta]

Storywise, though, it doesn't hold up to the earlier games. It suffers from the common problem of a writing team leaving a franchise after all the main conflicts have been resolved, and then the story flails wildly about after a new team is brought in with no clear idea of where to take the story from here.

I could say that Halo 4 was unnecessary but at least it kind of just returned to the status quo.
But Halo 5 really showed that they had no idea where they were going because of just how little to do with Halo 4 the story had.

 

[Laskar]

I could say that Halo 4 was unnecessary but at least it kind of just returned to the status quo.
But Halo 5 really showed that they had no idea where they were going because of just how little to do with Halo 4 the story had.

The disjoint between Halo 5 and Halo 4 also has a lot to do with the fact that the writing team was shuffled, with many of the writers who made Halo 4 good leaving for greener pastures, and writers who were merely there for Halo 4's development took the lead for Halo 5.

But yeah. You could sort of see a direction in the books that lead up to Halo 4, and there was a plotline that continued through Halo 4 and into Escalation. But that direction was gone by the time they published promotional books for Halo 5. Even if you ignore the fact that Halo 5 had nothing to do with those books or the comic, those books and comics had little to do with each other.

 

[Duke Nukem]

Halo should have ended at Halo 4 TBH.

Hopefully Halo Infinite will be good.

 

[Battlegrinder]

Halo should have ended at Halo 4 TBH.

Hopefully Halo Infinite will be good.

Halo should have ended at 3, with any post 3 games and materials focused on filling in the rest of the human covenant war or even going back to the insurrection era.

 

[Husky_Khan]

Looks like Halo 3: ODST has been released for the Master Chief Collection and is available on Steam and wherever else fine Halo digital games are sold.

Save 75% on Halo 3: ODST on Steam

Halo 3: ODST comes to PC as the next installment in Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Experience the events preceding Halo 3 through the eyes of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) as they return to familiar ground and attempt to uncover the motivations behind the Covenant’s invasion of New Mombasa.

store.steampowered.com

 

[Battlegrinder]

Yeah, it came out last night. I just finished running through the campaign with a few friends, in my case for the first time since release. A few points I recall from the game:

My combination of poor driving skills and deeply ingrained shoot-first-check-targets-later gunnery style means that the covenant are at best a secondary antagonist in vehicle segments.

It's utterly ridiculous that ODSTs can rip turrets off thier mounts like master chief can.

VISR mode has the same problem detective mode had in the first arkham game, in the devs created a really great, atmospheric environment and then a tool that hides it that the player is encouraged to keep on all the time.

There's no such thing as a bad time for a gravity hammer bezesker charge.

The ODSTs brought the worst weapons for their intended carrier assult mission, but coincidentally the best weapon for a lot of what they actually ended up doing.

ODST has the best warthog run and hold your ground sequence in the orginal trilogy, and the worst ending cuts ends.

The Rookie clearly has psychometric powers.

 

[Laskar]

Yeah, got some friends together and played through it last night.
When I said "Played through it," I mean we played through the whole campaign from start to finish in just over five hours. Maybe it would have been six hours if we were hunting down all of the audio logs, but it's a very short campaign. I see why Microsoft charging sixty dollars for it back in the day pissed off so many fans, though Bungie was truly misblamed for it.

Aside from the short campaign, ODST is probably the best way to play Halo 3. Baseline Halo 3 makes much better use of vehicles (Duh) and equipment, but ODST's weapon sandbox is much more refined. The battle rifle is gone, so all of the other weapons get their opportunity to shine, and movement and cover become much more important because you can't plink away at enemies from across the map, not unless you get your hands on the limited sniper rifles or carbines in the game. Oh, and dual wielding isn't forced into the game. I liked it in Halo 2, but Halo 3 made it clear that there wasn't a way to integrate it gracefully into Halo's gameplay.

Yeah, it came out last night. I just finished running through the campaign with a few friends, in my case for the first time since release. A few points I recall from the game:

My combination of poor driving skills and deeply ingrained shoot-first-check-targets-later gunnery style means that the covenant are at best a secondary antagonist in vehicle segments.

It's utterly ridiculous that ODSTs can rip turrets off thier mounts like master chief can.

VISR mode has the same problem detective mode had in the first arkham game, in the devs created a really great, atmospheric environment and then a tool that hides it that the player is encouraged to keep on all the time.

There's no such thing as a bad time for a gravity hammer bezesker charge.

ODST has the best warthog run and hold your ground sequence in the orginal trilogy, and the worst ending cuts ends.

The Rookie clearly has psychometric powers.

Yeah. Everything this guy said.
Halo 3 ODST is incredibly atmospheric, and it's nice to see what we missed in New Mombassa while we were gallivanting across the galaxy, but the story doesn't hold up to scrutiny. In a way, it's almost as bad as Halo 4, but I love ODST and I can't stand the fourth game for some reason.

 

[Battlegrinder]

I wouldn't say it or 4 are bad, exactly. 4 has a few, somewhat serious issues, but nothing that really damages my ability to enjoy it or that undermines the story it's telling about MC and Cortana. The bigger issue is the EU material that surrounds 4 (particularly the lead up) and spartan ops.

ODST just stumbles at the end. Yes, it stumbled really hard, but it was great up to that point and the ending isn't awful, it's just...aggressively not good.