The next Halo game will launch with a massive day-one update, Microsoft announced today — you’ll have to download 20 GB worth of “features and multiplayer content” to complete the Halo: Master Chief Collection, which is out November 11 for Xbox One.
That day-one update comes on top of what Microsoft says is a Blu-ray disc packed with 45GB worth of Master Chief shooting things. Hope you’ve got a fast internet connection! Microsoft does note that players will be able to start cranking through campaigns in this Halo collection, which includes the main four Halo games, before the patch is finished.
Here’s Microsoft:
From the start, our philosophy has been to give Halo fans the best possible experience and not compromise the quality or features of the collection. The result is that Halo: The Master Chief Collection will take up almost all of the usable space of a single Blu-ray (45 GB), and we will also issue a content update at launch that is estimated to be 20 GB. You’ll be able to start playing Campaign and more as the content is installing, with some features and multiplayer content being added via the update. Yes, the update is large, but we weren’t about to cut corners to save disc space. This ensures that you are getting every bit of Halo goodness we can fit in. Our work is not done, however, as we continue to tune, tweak and optimise the online experience to ensure a smooth multiplayer launch. This will continue right up until launch day.
The silver lining: If you’re sure you want the game and you’re OK with a digital copy, you can pre-order and pre-download both the full game and the day-one patch before November 11. Says a Microsoft rep to Kotaku:
If your Power Options are set to “Instant-On” and you have enabled “Automatic download updates and purchases,” then the content update will be downloaded in advance of launch.
On the other hand, if you’ve got a bandwidth cap or really crazy restrictions from your broadband provider, well, this really sucks, huh?
Comments
89 responses to “Halo Collection Has A 20GB Day-One Update”
This is out of control!
i mean i have arcahaic internet (12gig a month) but really no game needs to be 65gig. something is terribly wrong with developers or perhaps the consoles that forces this sort of sloppy construction
That’s because it isn’t one game, it’s 4 (or 6 depending on how you count).
It’s more like 4 games at 15gb each if that helps?
According to the article we get 4 Halo games in it.
from what I have read so far this is only for the multiplayer components of the games, I’m sorry but if you can’t download a 20gb file you shouldn’t be playing games online unless it’s runescape
as for the fact that it’s a day one download that’s pretty fcking nuts
I’ll be pre downloading it asap 🙂
and as mentioned by several people already it has 4/6 games on it
Halo CE Anniversary
Halo 2 Anniversary
Halo 3
Halo 4
+ Halo 2 Remade multi running on a hybrid of Halo 2/Halo5 engine
also I think the stuff for Halo 5 beta is on there too! (Dec 23)
my advice go digital it’s $59 usd on the Usa store just switch your region in system settings and provide an address that is in a tax free state of USA.. or always check the Hong Kong Store as well 🙂
Happy hunting Spartans!
Given the huge audience for this title, would it have been too crazy an idea to put a second disc in the box?
I agree, an install only disc for the extra content wouldn’t be much to ask, it would drive the cost up slightly for the extra material and manufacture
It does seem like the very obvious solution. Perhaps Microsoft were concerned that it would make them look bad putting a second install on top of the XBOX One’s already long install times (relative to the PS4)? Their logic being that people are somehow more forgiving of a game update download than a long install time.
Hmm. Perhaps they figure if they install one disc and the game is playable they can sneak the download in without players realising.
If the content was ready when they were pressing the discs, they would have included it on the main disc. This is probably a case where they hadn’t completed these features at that time, so continued working on them up until launch. The patch is the result of that work.
The official claim was that they basically couldn’t fit all the content onto one Blu-ray, hence why 20GB of it is via patch.
20GB of features would be a total re-write of the game. They’re being very upfront with that side of it. The 20GB is a bunch of content that simply wouldn’t fit on the disc. It’s not stuff they’re rushing to get included at the last minute it’s stuff that, for whatever reason, they chose to put up as a 20GB download rather than including via a second disc.
It’s safe to say that they will have structured it so you’ll be able to play multiplayer and begin all of the campaigns as soon as the disc is finished installed. You just won’t be able to skip to the last levels of the campaigns or run certain campaign playlists.
Apparently developers get ‘pissed off’ when the multiplayer disc never gets taken out of the case.
Their justification for not including Reach and ODST were that they couldn’t fit all the games onto one disc… It would annoy me if they said that and then released multiple discs anyway. (seeing as my two favourite Halo games were Reach and ODST)
That and they also stated that it’s the Master Chief Collection.. the devs have openly said it’s only the MC games that are included. They’ve never intended to include Reach or ODST, at least as far I recall.
Yeah, FFS!
So instead of taking the few cents cost of including a second disc for our customers, we force increased cost and a huge amount of inconvenience onto our customers.
Typical Microsoft attitude.
Perhaps the additional content wasn’t available at the time the games were being manufactured and packaged, perhaps they are still working on it. I am sure the process to add an extra disc is a lot more involved then just making them and slipping them into the case, it would involve a new case to hold 2 discs for starters
20gb is not massive these days… seriously it’s the Internet holding us back, not Microsoft making problems.
“Typical Microsoft attitude.”
He said while complaining about Microsoft making you download an update for a 4 full games, 100 multiplayer maps package for only $60.
Could you be any more of an idiot.
HD re-releases have much less development resource requirements and have usually made a lot of profit on their initial releases.
The cost of the games themselves just need to cover a much smaller porting team and due to their nature being much older games they can almost never command a full retail pricepoint. Of course by consolidating multiple into one you can hit that higher price point, even if you’re marketing is likely aiming to get people to pick it up for that one Halo they played in College… Whichever one it was.
So instead of spending $20 on the one game they’re nostalgic for they buy all of them.
Now I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with any of that, it’s a good business move and I have enough Halo nostalgia to make me want it. But you can’t act as if it’s some charitable act by MS and that we should bow down to their generosity, especially if we think a 20gb Day One patch is absurd.
Which it is.
Spartan Ops is coming out December, so I would say it’s at least partially because the game isn’t finished
This is an anti-piracy tactic. They’ve been doing it for a while. Massive day one updates. That game is stripped of features that are returned when you download the day 1 “patch”.
Frank from 343 already addressed this issue on NeoGAF. Apparently the OS doesn’t allow for multiple discs at the moment. Again, apparently. I’d doubt it s a cost thing given the 2.5 billion just spent on Minecraft. I’d assume the OS doesn’t allow for external installations.
So, digital pre-order it is
20gb is more data than I get in a month with the largest possible data cap.
Uhhhh joemit ? Who is your ISP
Honestly guys if you haven’t got a internet plan with more than 100Gb a month wtf… it’s 2014???
I’m in a rural area with Telstra 4G.
Owch.
Got a mate in a similar situation who ran calculations on how many months it would take him to download his Steam Sale purchases without going over his 4G cap.
I think it was somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred years.
He bought an external HDD, shipped it to me, I downloaded the games, and shipped it back. That’s how great regional Australia is for internet. It’s faster and cheaper to physically ship it.
Well, Telstra did have unmetered Steam servers, but as of the GameArena shutdown yesterday I have no idea whether they are still available. I’ll check it out, if they are they could improve your mate’s situation dramatically
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Not everyone lives in an area with stellar infrastructure.
Hell, I’m in our capital city, and my home can only get ADSL 1, and has a choice of only two providers who can even find us on the map: TPG and Telstra.
I know what year it is: someone tell our government.
Jesus. And some people still say we don’t need the NBN…
Have to remember that it is not an update for just one game.
But at 20GB it’s content not an update. It’s most likely stages used later in the individual games campaigns that aren’t needed right away. If it were just five bug fixing patches it wouldn’t come to anywhere near that. Stripped of content all the games put together wouldn’t amount to 20GB so it’s safe to say that 99.99% this data could easily be thrown on a disc and included (it’s installing on my XBOX One as we speak).
No, it’s Multiplayer content. Not Campaign content. As I said above, Frank from 343 already addressed this on NeoGAF.
I only get 100 GB per month and typically use at least 70 every month. While I could technically afford the huge download I just don’t want to have to download 20 GB of data at 1.5 Mb/s (8 Mb = 1 MB and 1000 MB = 1 GB) which would take around 29.7 hours of non-stop downloading with no other internet use of any kind happening. And this is BEFORE I can play the games in that collection.
Remember the days when you could just whack a cartridge or disk into a console and have the complete game ready to play instantly with no extra downloading needed?
Yeah…I also remember when you used to be able to fit 4 games, each with its own multiplayer mode, in full HD and 60fps on one cartridge…right?
Its not the same thing dude…
It obviously is not because I didn’t have to wait for at least 30 hours AFTER I put the disk into the console before I start playing
Yes… And those games didn’t give you the same amount of content and the same level of graphical fidelity that is being given with this package. Or have you forgotten that?
Your comparing apples to oranges my friend. As someone said below, it is unfortunate that it negatively impacts you but the problem lies with the internet connection.
Apples and oranges, both fruits of a similar size and generally round. We can look up and compare their exact compositions of sugars, vitamins and other nutrition information, we can also compare them for their different colouring.
That analogy is used really incorrectly, just like you are for fixating on one issue or point of difference.
He isn’t complaining about the technological differences… He’s complaining that the solution to overcome them is one that puts the cost and effort much more on the consumer rather than another easily technical solution which can be accomplished for a small cost on their end.
Perhaps they should consider the fact that customers who buy a physical copy may be doing it purely because of the quality of their internet, or did they learn nothing from the backlash of their always on console?
Except that the technological differences are profound. They make all the difference. They are the exact reason why it is no longer a matter of putting a disc in and playing, just like you would with a cartridge in the past. Your saying that I am fixating on a single issue or point of difference yet you have completely missed the point in the analogy. There is a similarity but they are not the same thing.
Simply put, gaming today is an entirely different beast than it was in the day of cartridges, indeed, it has also changed from what is was last generation.
It’s really not that different…
Gaming isn’t nearly as different as you think, just like apples and oranges are pretty much the same is very broad terms.
Content takes up a lot more space, but we have a lot more storage room.
We should be looking for the best of both worlds here, games should ship with all their content on the discs so that people with limited internet don’t get bent over and can immediately play. But we should also be able to have updates pushed that fix gameplay issues or bugs that weren’t able to be done during development.
I’m not saying all updates should be banished into the ether, as I’ve mentioned a few times it has it’s place even if it’s annoying more often than not. But it shouldn’t be abused.
Delivering content via patch, on day one, to people who have specifically not used your digital delivery system is wrong.
You are right, except with the tech differences, they should be including this on an extra disc.
In the cartridge days, adding extra ROM space to the cartridge cost a fortune, adding an extra disc of content these days costs cents.
The publishers should include a 2nd disc, seriously. I am tired of being an unpaid employee of companies where they expect you to do their work for them, to save themselves a dollar or two and screw the customer experience.
Even on a fast internet connection, this is a long wait, and on the fastest available where I live, we are talking *two days*
Get over it. Who the fuck cares if you have to wait.
Plus you can play the campaigns while the update downloads. So no you don’t have to wait 30 hours before you can play.
“Get over it. Who the fuck cares if you have to wait.”
Would YOU have the same attitude in my situation?
I put a disk into my console, install it and expect to be able to play it straight away which is the whole point of buying a physical copy in the first place. Having to wait 30 hours for a massive patch to download defeats that purpose
Technically you CAN start playing once you’ve installed the disc. The campaigns. You need to content update for Multiplayer.
You can start the campaign after the games install, and the 20 gb will background download. I think 2 discs would have been the best soloution, that’s not what happened.
I like Halo, it took me awhile to come around but I like Halo. I will buy this despite the 20gb Day 1 patch.
Will you still be able to play split screen co-op or is that seen as multiplayer and part of the update
I have no idea. I think Campaign in Split Screen mode will be possible without the update but I can not say so for sure. If all the Campaign is there that must mean all the ways to play Campaign are there but we can’t say so for sure.
Then put them on separate discs?
The truth is his point about the accessibility of putting in a game and it just playing was for years one of the main advantages a console had over any other kind of gaming.
Also I remember a couple of cartridges that had dozens of older games on them for the SNES. Wasn’t there one that had over a hundred games?
I would accept your point if not for the fact that games on the new consoles requiring patches like this is not necessarily new… It’s been like this since both consoles released nearly 12 months ago.
Yes they could fit 100 games on them. However, what was the size of each individual game? It’s still not the same thing. See comment above about graphical fidelity etc etc.
Could they have put it on a separate disc? Sure. It would have been nice if they did but unfortunately they didn’t. My point still stands. The “good old days” that doggies is talking about havnt been around for a while… So why is this surprising?
Although mind you this patch is only required for online play so waiting for 30 hours before the game can be played isn’t entirely accurate is it?
It’s because this is a particularly egregious example.
Having a 500mb day one patch is an annoyance, the sort of thing that makes you yearn for the days when sticking in a cartridge things just worked. But even on slow internet you leave it running for a couple of hours and it’s done.
It’s an annoyance, but it doesn’t have a huge affect and so you are less likely to vocally complain about it and news sites won’t cover the story.
Now you hear about an update that is 40 times that size… Announced before the release ready for day one. That is a slap in the face, and enough of an inconvenience that it could take days to download many places in Australia. It’s the kind of lazy shit that should be called out.
This isn’t a patch for stability issues or fixes they made after the game went gold, this is nearly a third of the games content. The former is forgivable and understandable in the modern world but the latter is an awful move.
Just because there isn’t reason to complain about every update, doesn’t mean there isn’t reason to complain about some.
Edit: If you bought the game purely for nostalgic multiplayer, which I’m sure many will, then it’s rather accurate to say you need to wait 30 hours.
Perhaps we should continue this discussion here, rather than in two separate places. I understand your point. However, Forza required a day one patch of 6GB, Dead Rising 3 was 13GB from memory, not the 500MB you were talking about. This is nothing new. Both games were unplayable without those patches. This is the cost of playing on the new consoles.
You think that this is an egregious example. Fair enough. I’m not going to try convince you otherwise. Given that those two examples were single games and required patches that big and this is a package which contains four complete games (albeit from previous generations). I’m not too bothered by it.
By all means complain and call it out. However, I maintain that stating “oh why isn’t this like the old days where it was all on one disc/cartridge/whatever!” is somewhat of an unrealistic expectation given the amount of content we are talking about.
The problem is that you are misunderstanding his point, willfully or otherwise.
It doesn’t matter if it’s on one disc or six, he just expects that his physical game that he bought should be playable when he sticks the disc in.
What if you had some friends come around, they notice Halo on your coffee table:
“Oh awesome! Let’s play some splitscreen man!”
“Sure, come back in two days.”
I pulled 500mb out of my ass as something annoyingly large but not too bad. I’ve had a few updates that take an hour or so to download and are an annoyance, so they’re probably around that size, though not necessarily day 1 updates.
I do recall there being similar outrage articles about both Forza and Dead Rising though.
I maintain that delivering content should be a big no-no and that their continued push towards these huge patches is annoying and disrespectful to customers who don’t live in a major US city.
No. I understand his point. I just believe his expectation, given how gaming has been for the last 12 months is unrealistic. Last gen? Sure. But now, I don’t think so.
Nevertheless, I see where you and doggie are coming from. I disagree, but I see your point.
Surprised no one has questioned that at 1.5mb/s his game would be patched in four hours, which isn’t even enough to finish the first game playing at a leisurely pace.
They could have included a second disc, or sent along a separate disc in a sleeve with physical copies, but honestly it’s not a big deal that they didn’t. We are reaching the point now where games are this size naturally, not to mention he can play the single player in the meantime.
Your maths is off by a factor of 8.
1.5 Mb/s is not equal to 1.5 MB/s, if you account for that then you get the exact numbers he posted.
I must have missed something in recent years, who the fuck calculates their speed by megabits with the necessity to perform calculations to get a speed that can be easily compared with an amount in megabytes?
1.5mb/s will always be megabytes to me, he may as well have said he downloads at 185kb/s instead, without breaking it down only to convert it later.
ISPs who can advertise a higher number for their speeds.
Seriously if one ISP advertised in MB and the other in Mb most lay customers would assume the latter was much faster.
Also the same issue occurs with KB and Kb but it’s rarer that makes a noticeable issue in lay conversations =P
Was never a problem before; you’re talking amongst your gaming peers so if you’re really after laymans terms then simply keep everything in the same form as is easily relative to a figure in megabytes; I’ve missed where people started to break it down further regardless of what an ISP advertises; assumed that on a gaming website people wouldn’t regurgitate what their ISP tells them and simply present the more understandable figure because we all know what we are talking about.
But the talk becomes broader and broader.
All the debate on NBN speeds was and is still done in Mb, most speedtest applications will return a result in Mbs… I have a feeling network engineers prefer using the number too for whatever reason I don’t know.
It’s largely gamers and pirates who think in MBs when it comes to downloading.
Yes but how many games back in the day attempted to have all 4 games (really 6 with the 2 anniversary editions and being able to swap back and forth) as well as all the extra stuff such as blur cinematics, the PC stuff and all existing DLC (well back then expansion) on the same cartridge?
Yes 20GB is a lot but at the same time this supposedly only limits online play – LAN play should still be mostly accessible and all the SP stuff is there. I don’t think there has been anything like this collection ever released on a console before (The closest is Orange Box but even that is beat by this).
As I mentioned above I recall having a SNES game with 101 different full games on it.
The number of games is completely irrelevant to the conversation or the complaint, it’s the delivery of said games that’s an issue.
How many of those games where of the huge 48Mb variety? There where a few SNES games out there that used those massive cartridges that commanded a premium for the games on them. Or where your 101 games the simple really small games that fit onto a 8Mb cartridge together. I remember Mega Drive games that advertised the fact that their game needed a 24Mb cartridge as a selling point. Let’s be clear the N64 maxxed out at 512Mb sized cartridges. So how much are you willing to pay for a cartridge made out of an SSD because otherwise we’re using the cheaper Disc based Media with Downloads. That’s going to be a $300 game.
The other problem is that the primary markets in Europe and America this is a 30 minute download, that’s not unreasonable. The problem is you live in a country that’s roughly 10 to 15 years behind the internet curve and going backwards. We’re almost ready to get to ADSL2 speeds (24Mb)! 4G would be expensive but my brother can hit 65Mb with his phone. Personally I’m below ADSL 1 (8Mb) as my current speed test is telling me 6.15Mb
These gigantic Day 1 patches, they will be getting bigger, and the rest of the world won’t have problems with them because they have 2014 Internet speeds, we have 2000 internet speeds and this kind of shit is ridiculous in the year 2000. It’s simply par for the course in the year 2014.
I think the worse problem is I have 500GB HDD in my XB1 and this is a 65GB game.
Remember Mb is Megabit, MB is the larger Megabyte. 1024 MB in a GB. Multiply GB by 8000 to get Mb.
So This 20GB patch is 160,000 Mb and on my connection that will take 7.2 hours. Or more likely 11.1 hours on the 4mb transfer rate I will more likely get.
To throw out a few more numbers, 1.8 hours on a 24Mb, 54 minutes (.888r) 41 minutes (.6837) on 4G on 50Mb and 27 minutes (.45) on 100Mb
Isn’t Maths fun? Yes I’m an IT guy, yes I like Maths and yes this was all done with Algebra.
All said and done, 2 discs for the Australian Market, yes they should have done it, am I surprised and outraged they didn’t? No. And please don’t direct your anger at Microsoft, direct at the NBN co because the future they are building is inadequate for the world we are living in, not the one we are going to be living in when they are finished.
The argument was that they never before managed to package four full games in, which is false.
The games were obviously what the technology allowed and probably had quite a few ports from previous generation consoles on there too.
I have more than enough anger for the blunder that’s the NBN, but they aren’t selling this product in a way that’s so awful for Australian consumers. Frankly having that amount of content not on the disc on day 1, that isn’t a separate optional purchase is wrong and should be called out.
That said if I hadn’t just moved and lost unlimited broadband I’d have just left it downloading for a few nights. Now that I’m living somewhere with a limit? Well I probably just won’t buy it.
That’s how I’ll actually deal with it, I just got annoyed at people here acting like it’s fine and that we should bend over and take it like good little consumers.
The problem is your Internet, not the games. Its totally not your fault but Internet is holding us back. Companies should be able to do this stuff but unfortunate it really affects people like you.
This is next-gen.
I recently tried to reinstall WoW just by all the expansions I have… it still demands a 28Gb download!
pretty good considering its now up to 5 expansion packs + base game
Oh whoops sorry, this was after using the Cataclysm(4th expansion) disk! Basically the Mists of Pandaria disk seems useless…
Wow with 5 expansions 28gb….
4 Halo games extra content 20gb
^ much more clarifiable
I’m pretty sure people can make do playing campaign for 24hrs or so, it’s got enough of them on the disc
Does Xbox allow you to play the game while installing now? I remember the patch downloading is priority which makes the game unplayable until game update is installed
Yeah, they said you can play the campaigns while it downloads.
That’s what they said since launch. A feature that is broken and people had to disconnect from the internet to force the disc install and then turn on to let it update when they stopped playing.
Recent experience I was playing a game, downloading an update for another game and experienced no issues.
My limited personal experience has generally been that “Ready to Play” means I can go to the main menu… Once I got to play half a tutorial mission too.
So if I buy the game I won’t be able to play online for another 2 days, yay.
According to my maths in reply above it’s closer to 12 hours. So if you buy it on the way home from work Friday, play the campaign a little that night, you should be good to go on Saturday.
Nah just my download speed is between .4 and 1.5 Mb/s. That’s if I don’t do anything else, God it will take ages.
Geez, you can probably download all 4 original games for way less.
Sign up with internode if you have an xboxone. All xbox live downloads and updates are excluded from your cap. Problem solved. Give me halo!
That is only true if you are on an internode DSLAM last time I checked.
Thank God for the NBN…oh wait…
This sort of thing really hurts us Australians,
FU Abbot!
It’s not abbot. Downloading the update won’t take that long. Its more about the size of people’s Internet plans. Its the Internet companies that are killing us with all this capped bull crap.
Instead of a second disc, they should’ve allowed a pre-game download. Get your pre-order(as most if not all people would’ve done), register at Microsoft or 343 site with your gamer tag, download the patch before you get the physical game.
So glad I have fibre now with no cap I feel for people with adsl and a cap does Australia have fibre in the big cities?
Some streets and suburbs, yes. However, most of urban Australia and practically all of rural Australia will be on copper (at best) for the foreseeable future.
Why don’t they allow us to download the update now, even if we are getting a physical copy of the game?
*blinks*
Guess I’ll be US game storing this one then. I honestly couldn’t be bothered buy the game instore only to have to wait a day to download the update/content on Day1.
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