After over six months of waiting, 343 Industries is delivering a new substantial update for Halo: The Master Chief Collection. The new update covers a broad swathe of improvements, including new content, quality-of-life changes, and even fixes for modding. Halo: The Master Chief Collection's new update will arrive on July 12, and it will hopefully bring back a lot of fans that have been waiting for an opportunity to get back into Halo.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a unique offering, of course. It's not a single game, so with a robust update like what 343 Industries is delivering changes, improvements, and additional content are spread across multiple games. The games included in Halo: The Master Chief Collection are Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4. It's a massive amount of content in one package.
The first major focus for 343's new Halo: The Master Chief Collection is Firefight, available in Halo: Reach and Halo 3: ODST. Firefight has now been added to the Custom Games Browser, allowing players to create and join custom Firefight sessions. This has a couple of other very positive benefits, too. First, Firefight now has support for join-in-progress, meaning players can join a match after it started. Second, 343 has increased the player total for Firefight in the Custom Games Browser from 4 to 8 players. Difficulty doesn't scale past four players, but it should allow some flexibility for custom groups.
Building on the other improvements to Firefight, 343 is also spinning off a new game mode for Halo: Reach. Those that played Halo: Reach's first multiplayer beta may recall a "Network Test 1" 3v3 PvP Generator Defense. That mode is now back with the upcoming update, disabling Firefight waves and bringing back a PvP Generator Defense mode with up to 8 players.
There's much more beyond Firefight to look forward to. Theater Mode has been added for Halo 4's campaign, as well as Spartan Ops modes, Halo 3 will be receiving a new game mode named Escalation Slayer, which should be familiar to fans of Call of Duty's Gun Game, all Halo: The Master Chief Collection games will support custom controller mapping, Golden Moa collectibles have been added to Halo 2, and the Acrophobia skull has been added to Halo: Combat Evolved. There should be something for every game in the Master Chief Collection.
All of this and so much more will be added in Halo: The Master Chief Collection's July 2023 update. 343 describes the update as the development team's first patch where it doesn't have to worry about new platform features or porting games to PC. That's enabled the team to really flesh out this update and make it worth the six-month wait. It's unclear what the future of Halo: The Master Chief Collection looks like, but for now there's a lot for Halo fans to be happy with.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.