Fix for Halo: The Master Chief Collection Problems Tonight

There’s some welcome relief for gamers effected by the Halo: The Master Chief Collection problems that surfaced last week after the game’s launch. According to 343 Industries, the game’s developer, a fix for Halo: The Master Chief Collection problems is coming today.

343 Industries made the announcement on its Halo Waypoint community website and blog late last night. The patch to fix the game’s problems will include upgrades for online matchmaking performance, the game’s interface, some gameplay changes and other issues the developers have tracked, according to that post.

If everything goes according to their plan 343 Industries expects the game update to begin alleviating gamers of their Halo: The Master Chief Collection problems, “mid-late afternoon Pacific Time.” This is the same update that was expected to arrive earlier in the week and was then delayed.

What follows a short summary about the content update is a gigantic list of changes. The most important ones are being made to matchmaking, or what most people would see as online multiplayer. When it launched last week, Halo: The Master Chief Collection problems practically ruined the entire multiplayer experience. Matchmaking prevented users from being able to play online matches with each other. Often times, the system just failed to find a decent match for players. Sometimes it did find a match but after a very, very long time searching.

Read: Halo: The Master Chief Collection Problems Emerge

There are some interface changes for names that were hard to read and text that just didn’t stand out enough. Another big part of this coming patch will be content changes for cheating. 343 Industries is changing things in the game’s Forge mode so that users can abuse it an effort to pick up achievements easily. Forge is the content creator that lets players make custom Halo maps of their own. Included in the update are also some changes that prevent players from booting other players out of the multiplayer experience. Fixes for statistics tracking are all over this update as well.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection should have been a love letter to longtime Halo fans. Many fans were expecting a remastered Halo 2 to mark the 10 year anniversary of the game’s launch on the original Xbox console. What they ended up getting was every, single Halo game to include John 117, who is also known as The Master Chief. Every multiplayer mode from Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3 and Halo 4 are included in the game. Additionally they each have remakes of their original multiplayer maps.

Halo and Halo 2 both have remastered campaigns in Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Users can switch between their old graphics engines and their new graphics engines at any time, provided they do so before or after a cut scene. Halo 2 has remastered sounds and completely new cut scenes across the board. Halo 3 and Halo 4 are both already in high-definition, but don’t sport a new graphics engine or new textures.  Together the entire game has 4000 in Gamerscore for users to earn.

With these Halo: The Master Chief Collection problems addressed, 343 Industries and Microsoft can now turn their attention to the future of the Halo franchise. As they were preparing to release The Master Chief Collection, Microsoft and 343 Industries revealed that the game will be the only way that users get their hands on Halo 5: The Guardians beta. Halo 5: The Guardians is expected to be available to those who purchase this game in late December. At that time users will be able to play the game’s multiplayer elements for free and provide valuable feedback directly to Microsoft and 343 Industries. Presumably, they’ll be able to process that feedback and make necessary changes to the game before its 2015 release.