April 17 Update



Howdy Insiders!

It's been about two weeks since the last update and as I'm settling back in after some time away for Spring Break, I wanted to share a quick update. I know folks are more eager than ever to see and hear more about both Reach and MCC for PC. And I you're even more excited at the prospects of getting hands-on with the game when flighting kicks off. The team is still hard at work on many facets of this massive project and we're getting closer, but at the same time there have been a few minor bumps along the way.



Previously I've said that "if things go according to plan, flighting should begin this month." As we're now in the back half of April, I'm still optimistic this will be the case but it's also possible those plans may not fully land as we initially hoped. Folks that have been around and follow me know that I'm all about trying to be as up front and honest as possible - both with good news and less favorable news. This means that sometimes we may share information about the current state of affairs and targets and plans that could end up changing slightly or dramatically. As long as folks want an open dialog, I'm happy to keep the information flowing, but we just need to all be mindful that talking about stuff early means there's always risks of changes - but I'm committed to keeping you abreast of the full story and when things change, sharing that info as soon as possible so we're always all on the same page. Cool? Cool.



So, over the past weeks the 343 publishing team and our partners at Splash Damage and Ruffian have been working nonstop to bring Reach to MCC and get things up and running well on PC. We've had a few small private external flights of Reach on Xbox One thus far which continue to help the team validate work and identify any show stoppers or big issues that need to be addressed before we roll anything out to a broader flighting group. Not to tease, but I have Reach MCC running on the Scorpio dev kit at my desk right now - that's where we got the screenshot of the campaign UI that Uny shared in the last community update. On Xbox it's looking and playing great already.



PC is considerably more complicated and requires a lot more work. We have internal builds floating around and have had lots of internal playtests that have been helping to generate bugs and gather valuable feedback. One of the team's main priorities to support PC flighting is getting the mouse/keyboard controls feeling as good as possible and there's been good progress on that front. Some key things are still coming together though - for example, in yesterday's playtest build, the full UI and functionality to remap keys isn't in yet so if you want to change defaults, it requires launching a separate application. That works for now, but isn't a viable experience for any kind of external flighting. I will say that it felt pretty good though and it looked fantastic. The "Pro Team" at 343 - a group of former pro players assembled to help focus on the competitive design/balance/experience for Halo Infinite - has been chipping in and spending a lot of time playing MCC on PC. We're looking to these experts as our first line of defense to help us keep moving in the right direction for the "feel" of the game. Yesterday Postums and I had to play against Mikwen and Heinz in a bloodbath of a Slayer game but it was all good in the name of testing and feedback. (I killed at least one of them once)



The other big factor and dependency for flighting is getting telemetry implemented into the game build to ensure our team can get the critical data and insights they need to validate all the hard work they're doing and the specific goals for a flight. This is complex and all new work that has to be done for each flight. I'm also learning that just the process of carving out a 'safe' build that can be flighted to external people is a learning process. While we've done this with MCC on Xbox all last year, doing this on Steam is a brand new process and is something we're still learning as we go.



To help tide folks over, Postums is working on an April development update blog which we're targeting for release sometime next week. Our partners at Splash Damage have passed along some insights and updates into the work they're doing and we're also poking our colleagues here to maybe throw us a screenshot or two. When we do get closer to the first public flight, we're also going to do a proper stream and showcase Reach and where it currently stands. Since the flights won't be under NDA and participants will stream that content, we want to get out in front of that and play it ourselves to provide proper context and insight for players on what will be a work-in-progress build.



We're still seeing a steady flow of Halo Insider sign-ups and we're incredibly thankful for the outpouring of support across the community. Hang in there - we're eager to share and show more as soon as we can!