Halo: MCC improves after long-awaited patch lands

During the last month or so we've been playing much more Halo: The Master Chief Collection - it's actually been working which has certainly helped (you can read our recent Frontline article here).

Today things are looking even rosier for fans, after a new patch was released by 343 Industries. Matchmaking has been improved, the party stability is fully functioning as well, and some adjustments have been made specifically to both Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2.

Here are the patch notes:

Matchmaking

• Made a variety of updates to improve matchmaking performance and success rates
• Improved matchmaking search times/time to match
• Improved stability throughout the matchmaking process across all titles

Parties

• Improved party stability

Halo 2

• Made improvements to multiplayer shot registration
• Improved campaign stability across a variety of levels
• Addressed stability issues for matchmaking and custom games
• Fixed issues around resuming H2A Campaign from "remastered" mode
• Improved medal display consistency

Halo: CE

• Fixed issues regarding aim assist which resulted in the reticle being pushed away from an enemy
• Improved shot registration consistency between host / client in peer-to-peer custom game matches
• Resolved a variety of UI inconsistencies, including team color randomization, medals, and in-game scoreboard display

We tested the servers during our (extended) lunch break, and the results are entirely encouraging. Just one match failed to start properly, but every other match we played, across a variety of different playlists and games, worked perfectly. The games were full, and for the most part, better balanced than has been the case in recent months.

We'll revisit the online side of Halo: The Master Chief Collection again in the coming weeks, but it certainly looks like 343i has finally put the most significant problems behind them and their Halo collection is now working as intended.