343 Industries tried to fix the game, but even after months, it remained in an almost unplayable state aside from the single-player campaigns. Even co-op was broken due to severe lag which made playing with a friend online impossible. What's odd is that only one of the two people experienced lag, usually the one who joined the other person's game. Even though The Master Chief Collection is currently functional, it still has a lot of problems.
A few days ago, the studio announced that they plan on fixing the collection and even upgrading it for Xbox One X. Following that announcement, 343 Industries' Frank O'Connor posted a detailed explanation on why it took the studio so look to address the concerns gamers had with the title and what they plan on doing to address them.
Since the game launched, Microsoft has improved the development tools available to game makers and that includes 343 Industries. Certain changes have been made to them due to the inception of the Xbox One X which now allows 343 Industries to go back and fix the problems in The Master Chief Collection.
The matchmaking issues stemmed from the fact that the game wasn't tested using real-world conditions. The team at 343 Industries thought that they were mimicking them accurately but O'Connor admitted that they made "faulty assumptions". He further went onto explain that they made changes to the way matchmaking worked on the original games and that ended up, in short, breaking the multiplayer portions of all the games. By the time they fixed it many people had already abandoned the title.
After months of fixes, the game became playable for the vast majority of users but problems still remained for many. The studio always thought that this was unacceptable and wanted to do better. In the post O'Connor wrote:
With Xbox One X on the horizon, it was obvious that we could simultaneously update the game to take advantage of the new hardware for folks that have it and use that as an opportunity to finally rearchitect and update some of the foundational issues and… matchmaking methods… these solutions were simply not possible until quite recently.
They've been testing fixes internally for many months but they just didn't have the tools to implement them until now. While the details of these new tools remain a mystery, it's great that 343 Industries will finally fix The Master Chief Collection. The update is expected to hit sometime in 2018 but O'Connor promised he would share more details soon.
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