A good 15 minutes of footage of Halo: Reach running on PC as part of the Master Chief Collection has finally appeared online, and it looks absolutely glorious. That is to say, it looks exactly as I remember, but in 4K – so glorious.
Developer 343 Industries sent out invites for a very exclusive closed test last week, meaning so far less than 1,000 fans have actually had a chance to get their hands on Reach and give it a whirl. 343 explained the reasoning for limiting the initial test to such a small size was to make absolutely sure everything was as good as it could be before rolling out larger tests.
Check out footage of the campaign mission Tip of the Spear below. We all know that’s the real reason you’re here. You don’t care about me.
343 explained in a forum post that the primary goal of the test is to find the best way of rolling out builds on Steam on a bigger scale, while the secondary goal is ” to get player feedback on the current state of mouse and keyboard controls and how the game ‘feels’ on PC.”
The studio explained:
This flight will include a broader range of PC hardware than what we’ve had access to thus far so we’re eager to see if any specific new issues arise related to things like drivers and different configurations.
The test predominately focused on the aforementioned Tip of the Spear mission, which 343 has said is missing some features and “is sure to have some rough edges”, such as audio problems and the occasional crash.
While this first wave of tests comes to an end today (Monday July 1), you can still sign up to the Halo Insider program here to learn about further opportunities to test Reach (and the rest of the games in The Master Chief Collection) as and when they happen.
343 announced The Master Chief Collection for PC back in March, and fans responded by losing their minds and sending the studio more pizza than they could possibly ever handle. Reach will be the first game to arrive on PC, followed by Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, the campaign from ODST, and Halo 4.
This port represents the first time we’ve ever seen Reach on PC, and fans can’t wait to party like it’s 2010 again. Veteran Halo players are even looking into ways they can reunite and play with their old Xbox 360 buddies from back in the day, which is just lovely.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.