Namely, the lack of BC support for the actual original Halo 1 and 2 on the Xbone and Series.
The MCC is nice, but:
- Halo 1 and 2 are STILL missing effects and other visuals. Halo 2 is still missing an entire real time lighting effect on every single cutscene.
You might be like “whatever, it’s just original Xbox”. but it really does make Halo 2 look more like the jump from Halo 1 that it was. For example, Arbiter standing next to a giant glowing armor closet:
There’s tons of cutscenes in Halo 2 that are broken like this. There’s a big image somewhere that I can’t find at the moment that shows how they’re all broken. Like how when Chief is in the bomb room all the mood lighting is gone, the elevator shaft is missing all the emergency red lights spinning, etc.
- Halo 4 is also missing lighting in certain cutscenes.
- Halo 3 is also broken in various subtle ways re: lighting.
“well, it runs at 60 or 120fps and is 4K” you say, and cool! but some of this missing stuff is … really a negative on the preservation side of things. Not enough that it’s unplayable, just, annoying. First world problems. And these lighting systems used hardware quirks on the original consoles they ran on, so it’s definitely going to take some work to restore them.
The thing that’s annoying is that the easy ‘fix’ (343 is working on fixing these issues, at least for H1) would be to also just let people play the original Halo 1 and 2 on the Xbone in the meantime. You’d get the original game PLUS it’d run in 4K… except 1 and 2 aren’t BC on the One, and it seems like it’s entirely arbitrary.
For comparison:
Xbox 360: you can play Halo 1 and 2 in BC. You can play Halo 1 Anniversary on 360.
Xbox One/Series: You can play Halo 1 Anniversary, Halo 3 (in 4K! which they added after the MCC’s release) in BC, ODST in BC Halo 4 in BC, and Reach in BC. They were all available digitally until the surprise delist late last year.
So if you want to play the original intact releases of <5 Halo, you need a minimum of two consoles no matter the configuration. You can play the 360 version of Halo 1 Anniversary on your One/Series but that’s also based off the PC port that MCC used so it has identical issues in the original graphics mode re:missing effects. They just need to whitelist Halo 1 and 2 for the emulator so people can play the OG releases if they want @ 4K.
And it’s not unheard of to release both the original in BC and a new edition. When Gears of War Ultimate Edition was released for the Xbox One, it ALSO included a license to the original 360 Gears of War 1, which ensured you had the choice to play the exact original release alongside the remaster. This is what the movie industry has done since DVD has been a thing, and with digital and BC it should be a thing on the game side. MS has done a really good job of pushing for and supporting BC, but this weirdness with Halo 1 and 2 could be fixed but seems to be held up by a random exec’s edict or something. I can’t think of a technical reason why.