In a bit of more cool gaming news yesterday, Microsoft announced that Halo: Master Chief Collection (MCC) would be coming to PC soon, while also announcing that they would (finally) be adding Halo Reach to the game!
Halo, for better or worse, is the flagship game series for the Xbox brand. Hell, Master Chief Collection was the first thing I installed and played on my Xbox One when I got it in 2015 — it containing Halo 1,2, 3 and 4, as well as having Halo 3: O.D.S.T (a side game in the series) all with improvements from their original versions (better graphics, sound, etc) makes it a damn near mandatory game to have on the console, to me, anyway, and while it has its issues, recently there has been a resurgence to improve and update the game, something I welcomed and hoped for!
It was always a bit odd to me that there never was a PC release of Halo: MCC, even though the original Halo: Combat Evolved got released for both the PC and Macintosh platforms back int he 2000’s. Of course, now the team is rectifying this in producing a version of MCC for the PC, which should be pretty damned awesome, especially for those who, for whatever reason, like Halo and have decent gaming PC’s but don’t own an Xbox One to play MCC on — hell, I would have fit that category in 2014!
This isn’t going to just be a port of the Xbox One version, no, apparently they are going to make it a proper, made for the PC version of the game, rather than just a hack job of the Xbox One version to make it playable on a PC. Time will tell how this pans out, but I’m optimistic!
The other, in some ways bigger news for Halo fans, however, is that the “prequil” game of the series, Halo: Reach, will be added to Halo: Master Chief Collection! While the game has been on the backwards compatible list for the Xbox One for many years now, that was still the Xbox 360 version of the game, with limitations from that console in tow. This will be a version given the same polish and improvements as the other Halo games in MCC, and I’m looking forward to it, as Reach was the first Halo game I played to completion, and I rather loved it. The Firefight mode, however, oh boy, that’s just something special to me — those endless battles, something about the way Halo plays just makes them work.
Halo Reach will, interestingly, be split up on the console, the main part of it a premium add on (I’m thinking $5 much like O.D.S.T) and the multiplayer being given free, but will not be separated on the PC side of things. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
In any case, I’m just rather excited. I’m not the biggest Halo fan (hell, the game originally made me not like the Xbox back in the early days of the brand — I just couldn’t get it and no one explained it in a way that made sense to me) but now, I’m kind of fond of it and can see and appreciate why it was such a big deal back in the day. Reach in some ways is the last traditional Halo game before the series began to change in Halo 4 and 5, so it has a soft spot in many fans hearts as well.
Really, to sum it all up, I just think this is all neat. That’s all, just neat. I’ll be excited to play Reach again, and the game coming to PC will be that much more Halo fun that others can have in what is, for most of the series, a new way to play. It’s not something revolutionary or, no pun intended, game changing — it’s simply what seemed inevitable, and should have came sooner, but thankfully is happening finally. It’s a win-win for everyone, you could say, who may take any interest in Halo!
More to come, as always
(no really this is a random stock image from Halo 3 I use all the time, I just felt like making a terrible joke)