10 Video Games You Shouldn't Have Played At Launch
5. Halo: The Master Chief Collection
The best of the Halo series marries a captivating campaign with some of the best multiplayer action in the arena of arcade style FPS titles. As such, when 343 Industries revealed a collection of the franchise’s major entries, fans were ecstatic. Every game, including the newly reworked Halo 2 Anniversary, in one place with all of the multiplayer content to boot.
Except if you played The Master Chief Collection on launch day, that is.
Whilst the campaigns all ran fine, the multiplayer portion broke immediately. Servers were unreliable and frustrating, with long loading times and low success rates. The game taunted helpless players with its wealth of maps, modes and nostalgia.
It also included a 15GB day one patch which already made gamers wait plenty of time to even get into the title’s menus… only to find that half the game wouldn’t even go anywhere.
343 publicly apologised and launched patches, slowly but surely getting the game running again. They also compensated early adopters with a free install of side-game Halo 3: ODST.
The Master Chief Collection still gets support in 2022 and, when bringing the title over to the next generation, the studio were exceptionally careful and performed rigorous tests to avoid a repeat of the last time.