Each game within the Master Chief Collection has problems running at a 60 FPS in one way or another. Halo 3 seems to fair the best, however it is simply an Xbox 360 game running on the Xbox One. Because of that, it is not nearly as technologically demanding as the other titles, even if it means having human NPC’s with almost octagonal-shaped heads.
No, the biggest problems for me, unfortunately, came in the Halo 2 Anniversary campaign; the game this collection is arguably centered around. The issues are plentiful:
- The reflections of pools of water in certain levels cannot mirror their reflection properly, resulting in massive stuttering.
- Objects occasionally clip through walls, including a fish swimming through a capsule inconspicuously.
- The Gravemind level featured especially bad framerate, even bugging out near the end and phantom “rewarding” me with 1,844,575,507,370 points upon completion.
- Mission 8, Delta Halo, consistently crashed my entire Xbox One system loading the checkpoint right outside the temple (aka, after 90% of the level had been completed). I couldn’t even open up the Xbox One menu; it would eventually hard crash and shut off by itself.
The Day 1 patch offers some critical fixes across the board (including that Delta Halo bug), but it still doesn’t do much for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Its troubles lie in the framerate (which is
staggeringly bad when travelling in a vehicle and during cutscenes to the point of apparent “chugging” along), but also in odd instances of mixed-up visual efforts. For example,
the design of orbital blasts of energy in the Anniversary Edition actually looks less detailed than its 2001 counterpart. They just look like a giant orb of energy, whereas the old edition featured two very distinct balls of energy.
What’s even odder is that, at times, the textures on walls or objects in Halo: CE Anniversary look laughably worse than those from the past. Rare do these improvements look worse, but it does happen enough times to question how they got past quality assurance.