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Halo: Reach is finally playable by the public for the first time, but fewer than 1,000 fans have the chance to test it out. The closed test of Halo: The Master Chief Collection—a compilation that brings lots of Halo games to PC for the first time—started yesterday, and it contains an updated build of the Halo: Reach demo that James tried at E3.
343 Industries stressed this first test is "very small", and that only a fraction of the registered Halo Insiders that showed an interest have been invited to play. The primary goal is to test how to roll out builds on Steam at a larger scale, while the secondary goal is to "get player feedback on the current state of mouse and keyboard controls and how the game 'feels' on PC", 343 said in a forum post.
"This flight will include a broader range of PC hardware than what we’ve had access to thus far so we’re eager to see if any specific new issues arise related to things like drivers and different configurations."
The test includes the Halo: Reach campaign mission Tip of the Spear. It's "missing numerous features and is sure to have some rough edges"—known issues include intermittent audio problems and full-on crashes. The test launched yesterday and will run until Monday, July 1.
Alongside the test, the dev team released 15 minutes of 4K gameplay from the campaign mission, which you can watch at the top of this article.