Halo 6 development won’t be affected by ongoing Master Chief Collection support

While we still don’t know when we’ll see Halo 6, developer 343 Industries has assured fans that ongoing support for Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Halo 5: Guardians won’t impact development of the series’s next major entry.

Writing in a new blog post, the studio said that the team working on ‘the next Halo FPS title’ and those beavering away on supporting older games are entirely separate, meaning there won’t be any instances of a lull in resources. Instead, a ‘small but experienced team’ is focusing on updates for what 343 calls ‘legacy’ Halo titles.

‘This team is completely separate from the broader 343 team working on the next Halo FPS title,’ 343 said. ‘There’s zero overlap or shared resources to ensure that the larger game team can remain laser focused on the future.’

Elsewhere, the studio confirmed what it plans to improve for The Master Chief Collection, which launched on Xbox One in 2014 accompanied by a myriad of online issues. Chiefly, the developer is going to patch the matchmaking APIs to improve reliability, particularly during parties. It’s also updating the XDK/APIs for the collection’s eight game engines.

Improving the engines will encompass a variety of things, such as ‘fully retiling textures, recompiling shaders,’ and players can expect to download a ‘sizeable’ update once these tweaks have been implemented. However, 343 insists that it will ‘definitely be worth it.’

‘We can also use platform advancements such as the ‘social manager’, which simplifies a lot of our code around friends and presence management. And foundationally, this update opens the possibility for other things we’d like to explore like custom game session browsing, Xbox Arena, or Mixer support,’ explained 343’s Andrew Schnickel. 

We thought Halo 5 was a brilliant addition to the mighty FPS franchise when it arrived in 2015, although were disappointed by The Master Chief Collection upon its initial launch.