343 Continues to Support Halo: Master Chief Collection, Reveals Beefy Update That Adds 8-Player Firefight

343 has announced a big update for Halo: Master Chief Collection, due out Wednesday July 12.

The core update, the first for MCC in over six months, adds a significant amount of new content for the shooter, welcome quality-of-life tweaks as well as modding improvements.

The highlight here is Firefight, which gets a number of important improvements. First up is the addition of a seamless drop-in-drop-out Firefight experience. This means players can now join-in-progress, as well as use the match rejoin feature in Firefight matchmade games. “Firefight matches tend to last longer than multiplayer matches,” 343 software engineer Dana Jerpbak said in a post on Halo Waypoint, “and now if you experience a connection hiccup during the match, you can seamlessly rejoin.”

This also means Firefight makes its debut in the Custom Games Browser, so players can create, browse for, and match into Firefight CGB sessions as they can with multiplayer sessions.

Now Firefight is in the CGB, 343 is increasing its max player count from four to eight. Jerpbak said the enemy count and difficulty do not scale with the player count in Firefight (“though we think Legendary eight-player Flood Firefight is a blast”). And 343 does not expect to change the player counts in the Firefight matchmaking playlists “at this time”.

“This simply provides more flexibility for custom Firefight games and we hope to see some awesome modded Firefight maps that really take advantage of the expanded player count too!” Jerpbak said.

MCC has been a true labor of love and has received a great many updates over the years, and we’re super excited to get this one into your hands.

With these changes to Firefight, players can now recreate the ‘Network Test 1’ PvP Generator Defense experience from the original Halo: Reach multiplayer beta. This was a 3v3 Firefight experience with waves disabled, which was not possible to recreate in the full game or its MCC release until now.

“We’ve added a new game variant option to Reach Firefight which disables enemy waves and enables legacy behavior from the beta,” Jerpbak said. “Now you can play the original PvP Generator Defense with up to eight players on the modern distributed networking model. Happy Firefighting!”

Elsewhere, the update makes Theater mode operational for both Halo 4’s campaign and Spartan Ops. This means you can now explore all of Halo 4’s campaign and Spartan Ops missions in Theater. This was a feature cut from Halo 4’s retail release in November 2012.

There’s custom gamepad remapping, too. So, if you find yourself confused switching from Halo Infinite to MCC, there’s a control scheme for that. Halo 3 is also getting a brand new (to Halo 3) gametype called Escalation Slayer. Other additions include a background video selection feature, golden moa statues in Halo 2, and the Acrophobia skull for Halo: Combat Evolved (this lets you fly around campaign levels). And this is cool: 343 is partnering with modding group the Digsite group to bring lost content from Halo: CE and Halo 2 to MCC on PC.

“MCC has been a true labor of love and has received a great many updates over the years, and we’re super excited to get this one into your hands,” community writer Alex Wakeford said.

This significant update for MCC comes amid 343’s ongoing and high-profile struggle to revive Halo Infinite. Season 4 launched last month and after an initial modest bump, it failed to significantly move the needle.

In June, 343 announced it had scrapped Halo Infinite’s story-driven seasonal cutscenes, news that came after significant lay-offs earlier this year. 343 said it made the “trade-off” to make further gameplay improvements instead of new story content for Halo Infinite.

343 was forced to clarify that “Halo and Master Chief are here to stay” following the lay-offs, saying it “will continue to develop Halo now and in the future, including epic stories, multiplayer, and more of what makes Halo great”. 343 is reportedly working on a new Halo project, codenamed Tatanka, built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine rather than the in-house Slipspace engine.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].