Halo 1 and 2 Four Player Co-op in Halo MCC is 'Further Down the List' of 343 Priorities - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 December 2020 / 9,716 Views
343 Industries in 2020 has been releasing Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC with one game at a time and now all six games in the collection are available.
In a new Halo Waypoint post the developer was asked if four-player campaign co-op would make its way to the original Xbox games, Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, in the collection.
343 Industries’ community manager Tyler 'Postums' Davis loves the idea of adding four-player co-op to the games, however, he says it would take a lot of work to implement and that it is "further down the list" of priorities.
"I absolutely love this idea, but in the grand scope of body of work in the teams backlog of need to do and want to do, this one is further down the list," said Davis. "Cracking open the old games to make this an official feature is about as big of a 10 as possible on the complexity scale.
"Now, that’s not saying it can’t be done, but in terms of effort to impact ratio, I think it’s not as far up there as updating the old co-op netcode, or bringing long lost content to the games, or even making other global upgrades with collection wide updates.
"In the future however, I would not be surprised in the least bit if players are able to mod the game content to make this a reality on PC. In the future when major development support for MCC ends up winding down, the modding community will be where MCC lives on. I know this to be true as we have seen many games on PC take on new forms and longer lifetimes for decades now through communities that mod."
Senior software engineer Sean 'Scoops' Cooper provided more details on what it would take to add four-player co-op.
"H1 Remastered’s co-op code is very much hard coded around there only being up to 2 players (or at least the networking parts of it)," said Cooper. "So to allow for 3 or 4 co-op players, that would have to be solved for and debugged first.
"Then you have to solve for the content changes. If I recall, the 2nd player spawns in the cryotube to right of the 1st player. But where would the others? Who are these two new mysterious Spartans? Flash clones of John 117? So more player spawn points would have to be added and verified. Plus other scripting related updates. Which runs the risk of inadvertently impacting existing behavior. Speaking of existing behavior, there’s also the design question of what that means for difficulty. H1 was built with 2 players in mind, but what happens with more? Is the game now easier? Are there enough resources for all players? Eg, sniper rifle ammo on T&R. What about vehicles? AoTCR has that over turned Warthog, but that sits three people.
"H2’s existing code is probably more at-the-ready for possibly going to 4 co-op players. However, you still have the same content changes/issues as H1.
"Both H1 and H2 probably also have load time issues to work out if two additional players (and machines) were added to the mix."
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is available on the Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
