Halo: The Master Chief Collection

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"Your journey begins."

— Tagline

Halo: The Master Chief Collection is an upcoming bundle of Halo games starring MCPO John-117. The set includes Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3, and Halo 4, as well as the digital feature Halo: Nightfall and access to the Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer beta. It will be released exclusively for the Xbox One on November 11, 2014 for $59.99 (USD).

Features

The four games in the collection will all be contained on a single disc and will be accessible through a unified interface known as the "Master Menu". The menu allows players to directly play any mission in any of the four games straight from purchase, or arrange the levels from different games into their own custom playlists. Some playlists arranged by 343 Industries will be readily available from launch.

All four titles have been optimized for the Xbox One and will run natively at 1080p and 60 frames per second. The collection also contains its own series of achievements for each of the four games, with the collective Gamerpoints attainable totaling 4000.

The collection will feature intro and outro cinematics created by Blur Studios, which will also be responsible for remastering the cutscenes in Halo 2 Anniversary. These cinematics will have narrative connections to Halo 5: Guardians. New terminals will also be featured, in addition to the original terminals of Halo 3, Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and Halo 4.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer will be available for all four games — each running from their respective original engines — and will be accessible via a unified matchmaking menu system. Players will be put into a lobby, then asked to vote for a match from a random selection of over 100 maps from all games (depending on playlist), rather than have the population split into groups for different games.

All games will ship with every multiplayer map ever packaged with Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4, as well as all downloadable content maps ever released (including six maps from Halo PC, among them Timberland and Gephyrophobia). The collection will also contain six remastered maps from Halo 2, the only confirmed being Ascension, Lockout, and Zanzibar, with the other three still to be officially announced.

Marketing

E3 2014 trailer

Main article: Halo: The Master Chief Collection announcement trailer

In their E3 2014 conference, Microsoft showed a pre-rendered trailer announcing the bundle.

The trailer features a remastered cutscene from the level Cairo Station from the Halo 2 campaign. The trailer shows John-117 dragging a Covenant antimatter charge through one of the hangar bays in Cairo Station to "return" the bomb to a CAS-class assault carrier. Arbiter Thel 'Vadam provides a voice-over for the trailer and it is revealed that an Office of Naval Intelligence agent, Locke, is searching for the Master Chief.

Pre-order Bonuses

Like Halo 4, pre-order bonuses for the bundle varies between retailers. So far, three of the bonuses are revealed to be skulls that modifies campaign gameplay, namely those introduced in Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Amazon offers the Piñata Skull,, GameStop offers the Bandanna Skull, and Best Buy offers the Grunt Funeral Skull.

Trivia

The Master Chief Collection contains 93 competitive multiplayer maps, Halo 4's 50 Spartan Ops missions, and 45 campaign missions.

Gallery

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  The main menu.

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  The cross-game campaign playlist menu.