Game developer 343 Industries announced that it is working to fix matchmaking issues on "Halo: The Master Chief Collection" (MCC).
In a post on Halo Waypoint, Franchise Development Director Frank O'Connor explained what went wrong in the making of the shooter game and what is being done to make things right.
The game was met with a lot of issues from the time it was launched in November 2014. "Halo" gaming forums were filled with complaints, with some players from Australia and New Zealand saying they had to wait for three hours to play a matchmaking game.
As O'Connor stated in the recent forum post, one of the hardest messages he received upon the game's release was, "How could you not know that matchmaking was going to break?"
At that time, Microsoft's defense was that the game was not yet available in all regions.
"Matching times will improve as we continue to roll out," a Microsoft spokesperson told IGN.
Alas, the problems were never fully resolved.
Microsoft has had enough time to look into what really went wrong since then. Now, O'Connor said the main problem was that "MCC was essentially six pretty different game engines strapped together and interlinked with highly complex and highly delicate new systems."
He explained that smaller test sizes did not allow the development team to realize that such issues would occur once the game was released.
It was not possible to resolve these problems before. But with recent updates, as well as the release of Xbox One X, 343 Industries now has the opportunity to re-architect and update the game's longstanding issues and matchmaking methods.
O'Connor ended the post with a promise that 2018 would be a much better year for players of "MCC."
"I'm going to follow up next year after we have better detail on the fixes and the Xbox One X update... That's what we owe you — that and a game we can both finally be satisfied with," he said.
