343 Industries, the developers of Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC) have released (and concluded while writing this) the flight of their new season 7 content update to the collection where they’re testing out some of the new stuff. And one of the big things that is getting tested is the restoration of the graphics in the Classic graphics mode of Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary. Basically, when the first Halo game was being ported to the PC by Gearbox Software, they broke some of the game’s graphical features like the transparency and bump mapping, so things like Covenant shields looked worse, and some surfaces looked really flat when they were supposed to have detail and depth. But now with this update, it’s finally getting fixed to look like how it did on the original Xbox version.
Take this Covenant pop up shield for example, in the current release version of the MCC it looks flat and fairly misty, however in the flight, it has a more electrical appearance and it turns red when shot at with a plasma weapon.
Another thing that was affected were the Covenant drop ships, among other things as well.
I am so freaking happy that almost a decade after Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary was released on the Xbox 360, the classic graphics mode is finally getting restored to be equal to the original Xbox version. This was something I never thought I would see happen, and it’s great to see the game’s original presentation being restored, and preserved in the most widely available way to play Halo CE. And it’s even better now that you don’t have to mess with mods to get an approximation of how the original looked on PC. And I can confidently say that this is now the best way to play the single player campaign to Halo CE. Maybe soon they’ll fix the classic graphics in Halo 2 next. I wanna give a shout-out to Mint Blitz for making the video I linked at the top of the post, I wasn’t able to get screenshots and footage of everything I wanted for this post before the flight ended.