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It arrived earlier this week: an Xbox Live redeem code for one of the most ambitious remastering projects ever undertaken, offering four complete classic Halo titles brought across to Xbox One, spread across 44.5GB of data. Halo: The Master Chief Collection is in the house - the single-player elements final, with multiplayer and co-op currently being fixed up via that forthcoming 20GB Day One patch. With embargoes firmly in place and the multiplayer modes still being polished off as we write, what we can tell you about this fascinating package is limited but enlightening nonetheless.While the single-player elements are fully-featured, final and complete, Microsoft's guidelines - put in place to ensure "the sense of rediscovery by fans" - limit us to showing you just one campaign level from each game, and in the case of the new anniversary edition of Halo 2, this turns out to be somewhat counter-productive. The Gravemind stage - with its limited, enclosed environments - does little to showcase one of the most anticipated elements of The Master Chief Collection: the ground-up remastering of this classic title, based on new assets designed with the power of Xbox One in mind. That will have to wait until the embargo lifts, when we will be looking more in-depth at the work of Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity.
However, the stages chosen for Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3 and Halo 4 offer up some interesting first impressions. The original Halo essentially takes the form of a direct conversion of the Xbox 360 Anniversary Edition, released in 2011. Innovative in many ways, a key component of the title was the ability to switch between the classic and remastered views at any point with just a single button-press. However, there were limitations in play - specifically an 1152x648 resolution plus a 30fps cap. Both of these restrictions are removed in the revised Anniversary Edition, which targets a full 1080p60 while retaining the retro 'switcheroo' feature.
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