Halo Director Explains What Went Wrong With The Master Chief Collection

Halo Master Chief Collection has experienced some difficulties, to say the least, but a recent update of the collection from Halo's franchise director Frank O'Connor attempted to explain what went wrong with the product and how they hoped to fix it.

For those who remember trying to take part in The Master Chief Collection in its previously unplayable state, you might be wondering what didn't go wrong as opposed to what did. O'Connor acknowledged those concerns and more in the blog post while prefacing it by saying that he wasn't here to make excuses, just to provide explanations.

"From a personal perspective, the MCC launch was one of my lowest ebbs, professionally," O'Connor began. "Every angry mail I received, I took to heart. I felt like I had personally let our fans down. I have not spent a single day since the night the game fell down in matchmaking where I didn't think about it."

As for the matchmaking component of Halo – certainly the core part of the series – O'Connor explained that the matchmaking environment that was extremely unstable hadn't been tested properly in a real-world environment. That factor combined with not getting to run tests at scales they hoped to reach created a turbulent matchmaking experience.

"So we genuinely didn't know until the day it released, how bad the matchmaking in particular was going to get," O'Connor said. "I'm not going to ignore the other bugs, they were real, and important, but the way the UI and matchmaking protocols interacted with each other exacerbated many of the smaller items and amplified a couple of them in unpredictable ways."

Changes were made to the original games' matchmaking, but that ended up messing with the multiplayer parts of each of the games. 343 Industries was able to fix it eventually, but by that point, many players had moved on.

To close out his post, O'Connor summed up his thoughts while bringing up the Xbox One X and the possibilities that are contained within the console.

"It may sound simplistic, but MCC was essentially six pretty different game engines strapped together and interlinked with highly complex and highly delicate new systems," he said. "With Xbox One X on the horizon, it was obvious that we could simultaneously update the game to take advantage of the new hardware for folks that have it and use that as an opportunity to finally rearchitect and update some of the foundational issues and networking/matchmaking methods."

O'Connor's full post about The Master Chief Collection went into great detail about the collection's issues and is certainly worth the read for Halo fans.