Years of teases and waiting have finally ended with this: Halo is back on PC in officially supported fashion.
In particular, this week's launch of 2011's Halo Reach on Windows PC is fascinating because of how it compares to the last time Microsoft tried the Halo-on-PC thing. Rewind to 2007, and Microsoft shoved out a Halo 2 port that required both Games For Windows Live and Windows Vista to run—and shipped in mod-unfriendly fashion. It received nary a patch or useful update and left diehard fans scrambling to patch it into decent shape.
Compare that to Halo Reach, which is still a Windows-only game but works on any Microsoft OS from Windows 7 and up and can be purchased either on the Windows Store or Steam. If you pay for Xbox Game Pass on PCs, you get it day-and-date via Windows Store. If you buy it on Steam, meanwhile, you get one heckuva cool option already: total mod support. Simply pick the game's "cheat detection disabled" option upon boot and you can fiddle with every relevant file (within a "friends-only" online sandbox, which is fair enough).
In spite of some imperfections at launch, Halo Reach's PC version is already a testament to a new attitude at Microsoft about PC gaming. (Since Halo Reach is pretty well known, this article focuses squarely on what's new or different in this PC port.)
There’s a lot of good news, so we’ll start with the bad
For one, Reach has arrived on Windows PCs by itself, which may surprise anyone who sees that it's part of the Halo: Master Chief Collection—as in the 2014 anthology that landed on Xbox One in 2015 with a crushing, bug-filled thud (but was eventually patched to a pretty shining state, complete with Xbox One X support). Why is this anthology only one game strong on PC, when it's up to six games on Xbox One consoles?
Xbox Game Studios has made clear that this piecemeal launch on PC is intentional. Instead of dumping multiple games onto Windows PCs simultaneously, the MCC team at 343 Industries is trying to nail one Halo port at a time—and some wonky issues upon Reach's launch confirm they're going the right route. [Update: To clarify, as of press time, fans can either buy Halo Reach by itself for $10 or the complete MCC for $40. The latter will include all other MCC games as they launch, one at a time, over the next year-plus.]
A litany of sound-mixing bugs currently curse every mode in the game, which I was able to replicate by simply playing the campaign, versus, and "Firefight" gauntlet modes. Sometimes, the sound mix goes all over the map, with volume levels surging or plummeting for various elements (speech, music, sound effects) with no rhyme or reason.
There's also an overly touchy anti-cheat detection system at launch, which punted me from all public matchmaking after only playing one match. A quick perusal of Halo Waypoint, the series' official forums, suggested I turn off the app that manages my Razer peripherals' backlit buttons, but this only temporarily fixed my problem. 343i eventually posted an official suggestion that affected players pick the "verify files" option in Steam, which forced a 2GB download (the whole package is roughly 20GB) and got me back online safe and sound ever since. But that suggestion only came via Halo Waypoint, not as an in-game "news feed" update, which could leave less vigilant players wholly offline and annoyed.
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Menu exploration, and we start with graphics settings. Custom resolution ratios are great, as are separate FOV sliders for normal and vehicle modes...
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...but then we only get two more options if we scroll down. And one of those is the severely unclear "graphics" toggle.
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Want to play Halo Reach on Steam? You'll have to create or sign into an Xbox Live account.
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This process is entirely free and doesn't require installing an additional app or loader, but it's an extra hurdle, all the same.
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In great news, at least, you get this mod-friendly startup splash screen when you load the game within Steam.
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Currently, you cannot map more than one key to each individual function, which 343i says it's looking to fix.
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The fact that you can't remap push-to-talk and text-chat toggles, on the other hand, is freaking insane. Come on, 343i.
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More control options.
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If you want mouse acceleration, there you go.
And for a customization-hungry crowd like PC players, Halo Reach is currently slight in the options department. Most glaring of all is a lack of discrete visual toggles. You can't go into the game and pick out levels of anti-aliasing, texture size, ambient occlusion, or even a toggle for bloom lighting effects. The only toggle is "original" or "enhanced" for graphics, and A/B testing of screens in various campaign moments implies that there's only one change to the "enhanced" half: a more generous level-of-detail (LOD) setting so that distant objects like foliage and certain buildings appear more detailed. And it's incredibly subtle stuff.
As a personal nitpick: though Halo Reach on Xbox One consoles includes support for split-screen modes, its PC counterpart does not. It's a glaring omission for a series whose chief Bonnie Ross previously announced that, going forward, all Halo shooters would come with split-screen options by default. I prefer to connect my PC to my living room TV for split-screen gaming whenever possible. In an official statement, a 343i representative told Ars that the team is "investigating possibilities" for split-screen play on PC but wouldn't confirm anything further than that.
Unlocked frame rates, unlocked mod access
Other than the above issues, which aren't slight, I may have had an easier time with the game than other enterprising Halo Reach PC players, judging by a massive day-one "issues" page posted at the official Xbox support site.
For one, I am sitting pretty with unlocked frame rate support, which means my campaign and multiplayer experience has screamed at an apparent 144Hz refresh rate in 1440p resolution. That kind of smooth gameplay experience was paramount in my hopes for the game's day-one experience, and I'm hopeful that the "experimental" toggle gets smoothed out soon, because the only issue it currently has is with frame hitching and stuttering during cut scenes. That's annoying, I'll admit, but I've yet to struggle with such issues interrupting my frantic running-and-jumping combat sensation.
Since I resolved my personal issues with anti-cheat detection, matchmaking has also been incredibly smooth, with average wait times for new matches hovering in the 60-second territory. I'm also happy to have seamless access to both my Xbox Live and Steam friends lists while playing Halo Reach on PC so that I can invite either or both sets of friends to my matchmaking parties.
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"Enhanced" graphics. The next image is from an identical scene but set to "original."
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"Original" graphics. You can see a slight change in vegetation detail, but that's it.
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Rip off a gun, get to work.
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It's not the prettiest game at all times, but the giant levels and readable terrain have aged well enough.
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NPCs from the 2011 era.
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Away we go.
And, honestly, Reach on PC is a mighty fine package for only $10. Its campaign is still one of the series' best, a swan song from Halo's creators at Bungie before they jumped ship to focus on Destiny. Its levels recall the original Halo: Combat Evolved philosophy of massive landscapes and brilliant battlegrounds built to emphasize the series' genius flank-and-rotate AI. And its multiplayer package is thick with combat arenas and matchmaking pools for its various modes—though I wish more of the modes disabled the game's "armor abilities" system, whose jetpack option breaks a lot of classic maps' traversal limitations.
Currently, the coolest thing for Halo Reach on PC is its immediate explosion in modding activity. You'll want to bookmark the r/HaloMods community at Reddit to keep an eye on what's being developed and to find download links (or, if you're fluent in the chat app Discord, join one of the chat groups listed at that Reddit link). The most promising mod thus far unlocks the Firefight mode's maps for use in versus play and fills those maps' corners with intelligent AI bots. The result already feels like the "PvPvE" Warzone mode from Halo 5, since this mod already bolts working AI systems into big-map multiplayer madness. But remember: You'll need the Steam version to access these. Halo Reach via the Windows Store locks its files away from easily moddable access. Shame.
In conclusion: A greater-than-tentative thumbs-up
Having kept an eye on the H:MCC development team's consistent stream of updates this year, I'm confident that the current slew of Halo Reach bugs and issues on PC will be resolved—or at least won't sit in a bubble of silence with 343i hoping that players forget about them. We may not get updates like more discrete visual toggles—the game's old code might be frozen in a way that makes visual customization prohibitive—but custom screen ratios, unlocked frame rates, and customizable FOV are already great steps in the tweak-for-PC direction.
And since this is an older game being smashed into working shape on PC, that means we can rest (mostly) assured that Xbox Game Studios won't be bolting extra obnoxious systems on top, particularly microtransactions. Halo Reach now is like Halo Reach then. And that's arguably the greatest comfort of all this time around.
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Halo Reach on PC is the customizable combat we've been wanting—but just barely - Ars Technica
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