Halo: The Master Chief Collection will soon include Halo: Reach and be available on the Windows store and Steam, Microsoft announced today during its Inside Xbox livestream.
Rather than make every game in the collection available all at once on PC, Microsoft said the collection will roll out one game at a time, starting with Halo: Reach and going in chronological order from there. Microsoft is pitching this incremental approach as a way to make the games available sooner rather than waiting until the entire collection is ready. The games will run at 60fps and support 4K.
On Xbox One, Halo: Reach multiplayer will be available as a free add-on for everyone who already owns the collection, while the single-player campaign will cost extra. Halo: Reach doesn’t yet have a release date on either PC or console.
At launch, The Master Chief Collection consisted of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 4. In 2015 343 Industries added Halo 3: ODST to the collection. The addition of Halo: Reach means it will soon contain every Halo shooter except for Halo 5, and that every game in the series will be available on Xbox Game Pass.
When The Master Chief Collection first launched in November of 2014, it was full of bugs and plagued with matchmaking issues. It took 343 Industries several years to eventually get things right, including a complete overhaul of the online network structure in the summer of 2018.
The last Halo game to get ported to PC was Halo 2 in 2007. Since then, every new game has been exclusive to the Xbox platform. A few years ago Microsoft began developing a free-to-play Halo game for PC using the Halo 3 engine. It was playable for a short time in Russia but was eventually canceled.
Modders later tried to bring that PC Halo game back to life but in April of last year those efforts were put on hold after Microsoft stepped in.