The issues with Halo: The Master Chief Collection for the Xbox One weren’t fixed with last week’s update leaving many owners frustrated with long matchmaking waits and other problems. 343 Industries General Manager Bonnie Ross provided an update on the status of the game Monday, along with the promise of another update this week, and another apology.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection was released on November 11 with players hoping to either re-live some of the greatest multiplayer experiences in Halo history, or taste it for the first time. Instead, they were met with disappointment and lengthy waits to even find matches. When matches were found, they ran into other issues like being split from their party or unbalanced teams.
“With the initial release of Halo: The Master Chief Collection … we have not delivered the experience you deserve,” Ross admitted in an open letter to fans posted on Halo Waypoint . “I personally apologize for this on behalf of us all at 343 Industries. Our team is committed to working around the clock until these issues are resolved.”
343 Industries is working “around the clock” to fix the problems with Halo: MCC , according to Ross. She says that once theses fixes are complete, they will do something to “make this right with our fans.”
Obviously, the promise of some compensation to Halo: MCC owners is necessary at this point as the patience of owners has worn thin with two weeks of issues. Posters on Reddit , NeoGAF , and elsewhere have spoken of how they have either returned the game or plan to return the game. The player population for the game has surely dropped as well, which is not a good thing during a holiday launch period.
The kind of compensation that can be given is fairly limited, however. Evolution Studios gave what was supposed to be premium DLC free to DriveClub owners for that game’s problems. However, there will be no DLC for Halo: MCC . It’s possible that the compensation cold be an extended Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta, but who knows at this point.
“On the matchmaking front, we have encountered unexpected issues that were not apparent in our internal test environment and that have resulted in a frustrating experience, including long matchmaking times and low session success rates,” Ross continued. “Within 343 Industries and Xbox, I can assure you that resolving these issues is our number one priority. We continue to partner with the Xbox platform team to analyze all data to make ongoing server-side adjustments to continually improve the matchmaking experience. We are also preparing additional content updates that will address existing campaign, UI, and other issues to improve the overall experience. With each update we will carefully analyze data to confirm that the improvements we’re seeing internally are also happening with fans at home.”
The fixes require updates to both the server-side of Halo: MCC and the software on the console. Ross hints that these changes will be rolled out “over the coming weeks” with the next console update planned for this week. 343 Industries has been rolling out daily updates to the game that can be tracked in this forum post .
“Please accept my heartfelt apologies for the delay and for the negative aspects of your experience to date. We’re doing everything in our power to resolve it as quickly as possible,” Ross concluded.
What do you think of this open letter from Ross and the promise of compensation for the launch problems with Halo: The Master Chief Collection ? Sound off in the comments below.
[Image courtesy of Gamespot.com]