Towards the holiday season and the end of the year, 343 Industries has brought us the latest Halo: The Master Chief Collection Development Update blog post. In it, the team detail their roadmap for Halo MCC: Season 5, what their focus is for next year, and reminisce a bit about their journey developing and maintaining Halo: MCC. Even discounting the Season 5 news, the blog post is definitely worth a look if you’re heavily invested with the Halo community. For a quick summary of the post though, read on below.
Updates That Will Arrive With Halo: MCC Season 5
Halo: MCC will still be getting new seasons next year. And since they’re not adding new titles into the collection, starting with Season 5 new seasons will be coming every two months. For now, 343 Industries is planning to release updates up until Season 10, and from there they’ll determine if “more will come”.
After a bit of a delay, Halo: MCC Season 5 is finally adding the unreleased MARINER and AKIS Halo: Reach armors. And as another surprise, all of the armor from the short-lived Halo Online is coming to Halo 3 as well. Interestingly though, the new cosmetic content for Reach and Halo 3 is already being added to the game along with today’s 2GB patch. While we can’t unlock and use them yet, we can see their preview and text description in the Spartan customization screen.
Next year the team promises that mod support will be their “main focus” and will be releasing official modding tools to the community. They will share more information about this after releasing the “first set of mod work” in 2021. Halo community manager Postums also added that they’re adding new Forge items and “super-secret features” but haven’t shed more light on it.
Lastly, the team has stated that PC split-screen is still in their backlog. Porting PC-exclusive features to console like an FOV slider still doesn’t have a “hard timeline” as well. But there are eight new features for Halo: MCC PC and Xbox that should be released in 2021 if all goes according to plan:
- View Model Adjustment for all games
- Steam Account Linking
- In Game FPS Cap/Adjustments
- PC File Share
- Additional Video Settings/Options
- Custom Game Browser
- Double Key Binds for all games
- Per Game Audio Options
Personally, I think Halo Online aesthetics clash too much with 3‘s designs. The armor update would be a better fit for 4, but Online was developed with 3’s engine so maybe there are some issues in porting the assets. However, 2021 sure is going to be exciting for Halo: MCCÂ Season 5 and beyond. What kind of mods are you looking forward to? New game modes or maybe four-player co-op for CE and 2? Tell me what you think of this update in the comments.