It’s launch day for the Halo: The Master Chief Collection, but players are struggling to get online to play in any of the multiplayer matches.
Earlier this morning, Microsoft issued an Xbox Live service alert to say that it’s working on the matchmaking problem that many players seem to be having. I tried to hop into a match this morning and managed to find a Capture the Flag round after about 20-30 minutes of waiting on connection to other players.
Here’s Microsoft’s full word on the matter:
Xbox members, are you having a tough time matchmaking in Halo: The Master Chief Collection? As you read this message, we’re working with our external partner to correct this issue right away. We appreciate your patience in the meantime! We’ll update you again when we have more information.
Other players, on both the Halo Waypoint forums and Halo Reddit threads seem to be experiencing something similar, although to varying degrees. Some players are reporting that they have spent hours in search of matches before finally finding one.
I’ll update this story as soon as Microsoft gives the clear signal for matchmaking.
Update: Microsoft is telling players to restart their searches if they’re having trouble finding matches. Here’s the word:
Xbox members, if you are having a tough time matchmaking in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, please restart your search. We are aware that some users are experiencing longer than normal matchmaking search times. We are actively working on a fix.
Comments
29 responses to “The Halo Collection’s Online Multiplayer Isn’t Working Properly”
You can still do co-op even if the pvp servers arent working right yet.
How do u play co-op ? I cannot figure out how to do it on xboxlive
Pfft. Who plays Halo for multi?
I was actually going to give an elaborate reason for why discussion of the campaign in my Halo 1 review was more important than talking about the multiplayer. But instead I decided to sum it up as “Fuck you”.
Breaking news: hugely popular multiplayer game has server load issues day one.
Coming up next: sky mysteriously blue again after last night’s darkness; possibly linked to the return of the flaming orb referred to as Helios in Greek mythology
I don’t recall any previous Bungie Halo game to have server issues. They were all able to function from release and didn’t need a 20gb patch to get it to work.
Both Halo 3 and Reach (the only Halo games I played online at launch) had some connection issues at the outset but nothing on this scale – most likely because Bungie stress-tested their servers with betas.
This is four games in one, so even though that doesn’t automatically equate to four times the audience, it will compound the issues. While the extent of the failure surpassed my expectations, the fact that there are issues is not surprising in the least.
If you’re going to post this on every Halo MCC post can you at least get it right? It’s 15GB (which is still huge).
Yeah neo kaiser… it’s 15gb mate get it right and you can really calm down about the review thingy,
in a side note at least this is microsoft it should be fixed In a day or so, unlike Sony and their lovely problems with DriveClub… What is it? 4 weeks now with no proper fix?
It’s coz they couldnt fit everything on one blueray disk.
So now just because every developer invariably ends up with unplayable services on day 1, it’s somehow acceptable?
We’re at the point where developers can more or less instantaneously apply fixes to a game post-launch, yet this kind of shit happens more often than back in the day when you could pop in a disk and have the game work just fine?
And yes it does have four games in one, but given the extent they’ve been marketing their anniversary mode and engine, I would have thought at least that would be working.
Strawman.
Since you’re referring to non-patachable games, i.e.: non-online content, I don’t see how this is relevant to launch issues related to deathmatch/PVP servers and matchmaking.
I hear the remastered campaign and co-op in Halo 2 Anniversary are working great, you should check it out.
Uh, no I’m not? Halo 2 and 3 and Reach and even 4, somehow, worked fine on day 1. So did many other multiplayer games.
That makes it acceptable for a hugely marketed part of the game to be completely broken too, does it? Besides, I finished the campaign last night, in about 8 hours. I’m playing through it again now, for the terminals. That’s half the reason I bought the game. The other half is the multiplayer, which currently doesn’t work. It’s not just broken like most launches end up being these days, but it is actually impossible to play.
Yes, we get it, game development is hard, the rest of the game is pretty great too. But I don’t get why people keep bending over and acting as apologists for shitty launches just because of this. They advertised a product, and it’s not working as advertised. Stop taking it up the ass and acknowledge that an increasing number of games don’t work as advertised when they come out these days. I hear AC Unity is having a huge amount of problems as well. This trend is only getting worse, and people saying “oh stop complaining, the rest of the game works just fine” are only making it worse.
Then I wonder why you implied that they never had launch issues or required patching. Because they did. not as extreme, but they had them.
Again, strawman. Stop that.
This is a shame. You are right to be annoyed.
I think of it more as optimism rather than apologism. Are you lumping me in with the apologists? It seems like you are. I’d like to clarify that I’m not being an apologist, I’m simply making observations about how things are, and my lack of surprise. I’ll pick up MCC on the weekend and I hope it’s rectified by then. Unity has been buggy at launch but that’s only part of the reason I’m glad I didn’t preorder it, given the lacklustre reviews on the non-technical aspects. I’ll likely skip it entirely since it doesn’t seem to advance the plot at all.
I’m not really even sure why we’re arguing.
Well, I could play them at least, and it was pretty good fun.
That’s slightly better. I’m just tired of the mentality that people ought not to be angry over this because it will only keep happening if they don’t get angry over it. Not that Kotaku is even likely to contribute to this compared to somewhere like the Halo Waypoint forums, but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to bother posting on that mental asylum.
I like to hope things will improve with time. I feel like so much goes into making a game that having one that works properly and the majority of people enjoy out of the gate is pretty much down to luck.
Granted, when we’re talking next-gen ports of old games that already worked fine you just want to bury your face in your hands and wait until the storm passes. Which is part of the reason I’m not even going to bother until the weekend.
Has any game in the past 2 years had a smooth online launch?
Why have companies gotten so bad at this?
What an absolute joke…….tried to get a multilayer game for 4 hours !!!FAILED!!! Why bother pre ordering? My boss wouldn’t be happy if I F*@d up this bad.
Man, I feel sorry for whoever went to a midnight launch. Not only do they have to wait for the install and patch download, but the matchmaking is screwed up that they took a day off work for nothing.
I just turned off my wireless and played the campaign. 😛
I’ve been keeping a close eye on what’s been happening and it’s pretty bad. Reports of 4v4 games looking for 10 players, 4v4 games becoming 5v3. Someone even said he played a Team Slayer game of 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1.
It’s amazing how much they screwed up this collection when you would think rereleasing a game would be easier then releasing the actual game.
Halo has always had bad matchmaking in comparison to games like COD, Titanfall and even Destiny (which I’d call slow for new gen games). I’m not surprised there’s issues. No worries though, I got four campaigns to enjoy until the fix themselves.
Titanfall and Destiny are bad comparisons. As for CoD, they have had even worse issues, especially with MW2.
I’m getting bugs in the campaigns too though.
Achievements not unlocking.
Being unable to add skulls to the cross game playlists.
Problems with the controller button mapping reverting back to defaults.
This frigging generation man…
Yeah don’t worry, everyone has the same issues. Achievements and other things are all locked to xbox live so if that’s failing they won’t unlock. If your most popular game requires a 16gb day one download you better be sure your servers are ready to be smashed!
It’s a game made by a Microsoft owned company, running on a Microsoft console, using Microsoft’s online service – probably using Microsoft Azure Cloud. What the hell external partner are they talking about?
Saber in Russia did the 2 Anniversary editions.
Certain Affinity in Texas did a lot of the multiplayer systems and map design on some of the games.
Ruffian in the UK did some of the upscale work on 3 & 4 (I think).
343i is working on Halo 5.
legit info that’s also actually interesting.
Much thanks.
24 hours since launch haven’t been able to match make. Got into a couple lobbys but couldn’t fill out the team so it failed. I’m not pissed just means I’m putting down the game & with other big releases within the next week maybe I won’t experience the MCC multiplayer for a long while.
It feels very rushed and barely tested, there are spelling and grammar issues in the game introductions, most of the team games I have managed to get in to end up 4v3 or 3v2, there is too much dead time (aside from matchmaking not working very well, you get too long to select one of three maps to play and post game it takes a while to load back to menus) and worst of all, Halo: CE has issues like players spawning within vision of the other team, the type of problem that was fixed even before Halo’s original release back in 2001. I’m hoping matchmaking improves tonight but it looks like the problems run deep here, which is a real shame.