MCC Development Update – October 2020

31 Oct 2020Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Welcome back to our latest monthly helping of updates and insights straight from the MCC development trenches! It’s been a busy stretch since we last spoke, with Halo 4 flighting fully underway and our teams working hard towards launching the sixth and final title on PC in the near future. Further, our own Postums is out on a leave (don’t worry, he’s back next week!) so yours truly is back at the helm hoping I can measure up to the high bars and tomes of information of months’ past. Thankfully, our friends on the 343 Publishing Team are here and ready to share updates and insights (so much so that you'll find the vast majority of this update is actually written by them).

For our October development blog we’re going to start things off with an update on Halo 4 flighting, talk about newly announced next-gen enhancements coming to Xbox Series X|S, dig into our ‘community mail bag’ and answer some of your most pressing questions, cover a few design items, and get a state of the game report from Farns. Let’s dive in, shall we?

FLIGHT CHECK

Our latest flight for MCC on Xbox and PC has been up and running for about a week now. Earlier today, an update was released for the flight build on all platforms that includes a variety of fixes and additions. If you're currently a participant in the flight, you should automatically get the patch the next time you log in. Active flight participants can view the updated patch notes and details HERE and be sure to check out the latest known issues HERE (note only registered players in the current flight will be able to access this link).

Additionally, to help ensure these new changes get adequate time in the wild, the flight itself has been extended and is now targeted to conclude on Friday, November 6. You'll also find an updated playtimes schedule that runs through the remainder of the flight which includes alternating modes and focus areas daily between 10AM-1PM and 5PM-9PM PT. Of course, you're free to play and provide feedback and file tickets on anything in the flight build but given some of the new matchmaking-related features coming to MCC, we're really hoping to have a healthy population moving through different Halo 4 MP modes on all platforms.

To talk a bit more about this current flight, today's patch, and the process in general, please welcome Publishing Team Associate Producer Chris Case!

Chris, welcome! Seeing as this is your very first appearance in an MCC development blog, let’s start with a quick intro and a bit of background. Clearly, your name is Chris, but what’s your day to day role as an Associate Producer on the Publishing Team? You’ve been involved with MCC for quite some time now even before this role – what’s the path that brought you to us today?

Chris: Thanks Brian! MCC has been a consistent landmark in my background working with games. My first job was a contract tester on MCC back in 2014, and later as test engineer when we began our work reviving the collection in 2017. I’ve worked on a few other Microsoft titles in the meanwhile, but I’ve found myself back at MCC multiple times now and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to see MCC through so many different stages.

Generally, my day to day involves planning with our production team, working with Support and Community teams to help give up-to-date information on our project, working with Test to ensure they’re unblocked and have the information they need to find bugs, and running our nightly Triage sessions where we discuss project status and work remaining. Ultimately, I aim to spend most of my time listening to folks on our team and helping find solutions to daily problems. Lately, most of those efforts have been put into supporting our flight and launch processes.

So we’re just over a week into this latest flight - How’s it going out there? What are some of the key learnings and takeaways the team has found so far? Anything truly surprising or unexpected pop up?

Chris: There’s always a little anxiety prior to launching a flight, for us this time it was around PC to Xbox crossplay, Input-based Matchmaking, and the Server Region Selection. These have been hotly requested features, so we’re pleased to see the positive feedback around these items from folks! Our biggest reports from Halo Support (which we monitor daily) have been around giant white squares on Pitfall, crashes while alt-tab’d out, and a binding issue with the Sprint key - all of which were prioritized for fixing in today's Flight Patch and upcoming retail patch. I think our biggest learning from this is usually the same as all our flights – often our biggest concerns going in usually aren’t the biggest issues we hear about from Flighting, and that’s a great thing. While we’re listening on all fronts, the reports we get through Support really help our team prioritize bugs that are impacting the community the most. The alt-tab crash is a good example of this: a known bug we planned to file for launch, but was given further priority and upgrade as a ship blocker after a majority of our support tickets came through with PC users encountering issues with this.

Another issue we’ve have reported ties to a progression blocker on the mission Reclaimer. Interestingly, issues on this mission have dated back to the original legacy 360 version (specifically around bits of the level failing to load). Improvements here have been on our backlog for some time, but we’ve often found that there are some other gremlins that show up around this. Support recently pulled one we haven’t seen before that involves some non-regulation jetpack usage.

To read the rest of the interview with Chris, get an update on the state of the game with Farns, Q&A with Max and Dana, and a whole lot more, head over to Halo Waypoint and read the rest of the update today!

If you want to catch up on past editions of the dev update, you can find the one you want here: