Today, Halo 3 joins the Master Chief Collection on PC. Equally as important as this release is the patch that went live earlier today alongside it. Rolling out patches for MCC with game launches is standard, but there’s one particular change that’s worth celebrating. The July 14 patch updates the audio for Halo: Reach. As you may recall, Reach was the first MCC game to launch on PC. It took 343 Industries and co-developers Splash Damage/Ruffian months of internal tests to translate its archaic code and design standards into something today’s PC players would find acceptable. So many of those posed their own challenges, but audio was seemingly the hardest. Halo: Reach shipped with muffled, echoey audio on PC. This made weapons feel weak, robbing them of their oomph. The internet was soon flooded with videos comparing the sounds on Xbox One and Xbox 360 with those on PC, and it wasn’t flattering.
Today, seven months later, the developer finally addressed all of that, and updated Halo 3’s audio in the process - though that has much less of an impact since it was fixing a problem only experienced by players in testing. The patch also adds Forge support for Reach, Halo 2: Anniversary, and Halo 3, and brings a few other neat mechanics like the Acrophobia Skull in Halo 3. Hit up Halo Waypoint for the full change log.
