Halo 1 has broken audio all over the place and input issues which makes guns have different spread and behaviors compared to the previous releases on other platforms and MCC prior to the 2020 PC update, which had regressions which went back to the xbox. Performance is overall lower on consoles than it was prior to the PC release and Xbox update. Also classic aiming doesn't work at all, as in you can not look around at all.
Halo 2 has suffered huge performance issues in campaign, with people reporting drops as low as the high 20s even on One X consoles after the PC update. AI and other framerate influenced issues continue to be unfixed and unchanged since 2014 5.1 audio is completely broken. Guns do not function as they did in 2004 in the MCC port with firing rates often being off, the extent of the root cause of this issue has yet to be fully investigated. Since the PC update, the game doesn't use the full res textures on some platforms where it previously had been able to.
Halo 3 has issues with it's specular maps (and so does reach). Changes in MCC still have effected its netcode negatively. There is also reason to believe the change to 60 FPS has altered damage scaling (this is confirmed in reach). Performance has degraded in xbox versions since the PC release.
Reach has audio issues as well, but it is not as severe as it was at launch. However, recent updates broke the specular effects on all the ingame objects, and it has an issue where damage isn't scaling correctly. This is most easily seen in the space combat, where on PC the game because significantly easier when the FPS cap is set to 30. This damage scaling issue with projectiles is an issue universally though the game.
Halo 4 has multiple instances of broken lighting (at least one cinematic has no lighting at all), and visual artifacts as textures render where they shouldn't in areas. More importantly, there seems to be an issue which increases the rate of garbage collection in the game the longer it is played, where dropped weapons in campaign will despawn even faster than they did previously or on the 360, sometimes just by moving the camera away from them.
These games are terribly preserved, and the known issues list continues to grow on 343's site with every update they put out. Sure maybe if you don't care about the integrity of the gameplay, and just want to casually shoot some aliens it's fine. But at the end of the day, the groundbreaking audio work done in this series, the meticulously tuned and tested gameplay has been altered, and the developers intended weapon functionality is broken in nearly every game in the series.
They're mediocre ports, accepted by people with apparently mediocre standards. It shouldn't be controversial to at the bare minimum, expect these games to play the way they did when they originally. And certainly shouldn't be "rubbish" to expect these games to play the way they did before on xbox before they were updated this year for the PC ports .
Digital download is the only way, the discs content is at this point 100% replaced by the update you will have to download. Ideally to play Halo as it was intended, you'd need to use the back compat versions (and h3 runs at 4k on X!) but yesterday 343 removed all the xbox 360 versions from the Marketplace and Gamepass. So you are better off just picking up 360 discs.
Last edited:
