simply didn’t work for many players,
and other issues big and small made
the whole thing feel barely held
together with tape. It was a black eye
for 343 that didn’t fade until 2018,
when a new dedicated team started
to rebuild Master Chief.
“Ibelievethatwasthebeginnings
ofthefirsttimethestudiohaseverthem to a framerate like 144 fps
requires a lot of interpolation – the
path the animation takes between
defined key frames. That can have
some weird side effects, like graphics
clipping through one another. Fahrny
says their first animations for Reach
even caused motion sickness in some
players. The brain can tell something
weird’s going on with that kind of
interpolation. But creating completely
new animations for these old games
isn’t feasible, so it takes a lot of
iteration to get it as good as it can be.
Little quirks pop up everywhere,
from the netcode to the controls.
Halo Reach plays like a dream on
dedicated servers, but strangely, the
AI Grunts in the Firefight mode lostABOVE: Combat
Evolved’s The Silent
Cartographer
mission is still an
absolute banger.
MAPS OF MY YOUTH
These two maps dominated Halo: Custom Edition
community servers. Will they make a comeback in 2020?WARTORNCOVE
Twovalleysopenoutintoa covewherea tank
sits,waitingtodominatethemap.CTF
matcheswerefullofheroicandfoolish
warthogruns,trickerywiththeteleporters,
andhopelessassaultsonthattank.NEW MOMBASA CLASSIC
An at-the-time awe-inspiring recreation of
Bungie’s 2003 E3 demo for Halo 2, turned
into a multiplayer map. Vehicles could
dominate the wide city streets, but the
sewers made sneak attacks a thrill.“It’s hard to go through all the
mission scripts line by line and go
‘Oh, this is going to be a problem,’”
says Schnickel. “It’s easy to miss stuff
and sometimes it would just exhibit
in weird ways. There was one in, I
think, the Halo 4 Spartan Ops – there
was a jackal up on a cliff somewhere,
and you couldn’t kill him. You’d be
shooting at him and he just would
not die. It was a script timing issue,
so it just takes a lot of careful
debugging to find that.”
Uncapped framerates are even
harder for old games, since the
original programming’s dependence
on frame timing goes completely out
the window. Animations are tricky. If
they were created for 30 fps, adaptinghad a flighting program where we started to work on this
system of alpha-style builds to iterate on with players
giving us feedback,” says Brian Jarrard, community
director on the project.
Jarrard writes many of the massive community
updates that have come to define 343’s new era of
transparency around rebuilding The Master Chief
Collection, and it was on an Inside Xbox stream in early
2019 that he announced Halo was finally coming to PC.
Inspired by a viral Reddit joke, ecstatic PC fans started
sending pizzas to the 343 office. As more and more pies
piled up, he had to beg them not to send more.
“They expect a lot, and the bar is very high. My guess
is there’s a lot of pent-up sentiment that a lot of times PC
gamers feel like they’re getting the leftovers from
consoles, getting bad ports. So it was important to us that
this could not be just a port. We had to figure out the way
to make it feel like it was a native PC product.”
The exciting news is that every game is up and
running on PC right now, in various stages of completion.
The list of expected features is easy to rattle off: unlocked
framerates, 4K support, dedicated servers, mod support.
Actually implementing them... well, that’s less so.
Let’s start with framerate. Say you’re simply taking a
game originally locked to 30 FPS and making it run at 60
FPS. When game code is written, explains technical
director Andrew Schnickel, some things are set to happen
every 1/30th of a second, while others are programmed in
relation to one ‘game tick’. At the original framerate, those
would be equivalent. But if you double the framerate, all
of a sudden they aren’t. This can make guns fire too
quickly, or effects animate at the wrong speed. It can even
break bits of the campaign, because scripts don’t trigger
properly. It varies from game to game.