Halo MCC China Video.pdf - Owen A. Spence

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Halo MCC China Video: What is MCC China: ● A version of MCC made exclusively for the Chinese audience ● This special Chinese skew of the game was region locked to Chinese Consoles until early 2020 when a workaround was discovered by a TrueAchievements user that allowed the game to be playable on universal Xbox one hardware. ● Now, this version has a separate achievement list and is considered a different game altogether as far as the Xbox ecosystem is concerned. When looking at the game on TrueAchievements, it shows that less than 300 people, of the site’s 500,000 registered gamers, have ever accessed this version of game. So, naturally I wanted to snag it to try and double dip in the plethora of rare achievements that MCC China has to offer. ● That said, most of the chatter online about this game, whether on TrueAchievements and other forums just mentioned how it was mostly an older, un-updated, version of the game we all knew and focused mainly on what was broken still, rather than the myriad of changes that were made to all 4 titles that never existed in the standard retail versions. ● So in this video we’re going to be breaking down exactly what makes this version of the game so special, cataloging all the differences we could find in the whole of MCC running from the menu through Halo CE, 2, 3 and 4. Halo CE: ● Crashing right into Halo CE: Immediately, the first thing you’ll notice upon tearing into the covenant is that, when killed, their bodies shrink and seem to disappear. ● You’ll notice that as we progress, corpse behavior, and the removal of defeated enemies marks the first clear programmed difference between the retail and Chinese versions of this game. Every title handles corpse behavior differently, for example: ● In Halo CE, while at first glance it looks like corpses disappear entirely, their bodies actually seem to shrink whenever they reach the end of their death animation. ● With a sharp eye and the help of the SRS99C-S2 AM sniper scope, we can observe that they don’t actually disappear at all, and in fact remain in a tiny, miniaturized, death state. This is most easily observed in game with hunters, as their fuel rod lighting effect doesn’t seem to properly scale down with the rest of the biped. ● This “shrinking effect” occurs in both the classic and remastered versions of Halo CE and affects all human, covenant, and flood corpses that are present in the game, as long the game engine is coded to perceive them as dead, or in a corpse-like state. ● This affects more than just cleaning up your rampage as the chief. ● For example, at the beginning of the mission Halo, the bodies that should be littered around the cabin of the escape pod are nowhere to be found. Corpses and blood consistently don’t spawn as set pieces and as a result, some of the game’s environmental storytelling is lost. ● Moving onto the flood, more than just their corpse behavior has been altered. ● For starters, popcorn flood do not pop, they simply disappear. The same is true of their larger, more tumorous, cousins, the carrier forms. Upon death, these variants of flood simply disappear. Despite still having their classic physics impulse that sends the player flying, their death and corpse animation have been made transparent or removed from the game. ● Captain Keyes final form as a Proto-Gravemind has been heavily censored in both the original and classic versions of the game. While he retains his original geometry and mesh, his texture has been downgraded so as to obscure the gore present in the scene. ● On top of this, no blood or flood juice is able to be generated from weaponry or bodies, making this version of CE borderline sterile compared to the retail release. ● On the bright side, these changes mean that flood do not respawn after being killed, making some missions considerably easier on higher difficulties. ● However, a popular speedrunning strategy known as floodbumping is rendered impossible due to this change. Floodbumping takes advantage of certain flood enemies which are programmed to reanimate and come back to life to attack the player. In the normal version of Halo CE, it’s possible to deliberately kill a flood in a certain position knowing that it will renanimate and progress the player through an impassable barrier, allowing you to skip a portion of some levels. However, since the flood in this game shrink and do not respawn, this scenario is never possible. ● The removal of blood also has some drastic effects on some of the easter eggs in Halo CE as well. HCE Extras: ● For example, the Rex Easter Egg in the mission The Maw is scrawled in what looks to be some type of burn or scorch mark, instead of its classic blood spatter. ● Similarly the Megg easter egg in The Pillar of Autumn is made of only the bullets and is completely missing its signature blood splatter. ● In the mission Assault on the Control room, the three dead grunts from the opening cutscene disappear and are no longer present at the bottom of the pit like they would be in the retail release. ● CEA Terminals are also technically inaccessible in the Chinese version of the game because although the game grants you the ability to access them throughout the campaign, you will be redirected to the US version of the Halo Channel in order to watch them. (Not to mention that this also doesn’t work as a way to watch the terminals in the normal version of MCC, as the current build of the game doesn't support Halo Channel integrations anymore due to the sunsetting of that service and app.) HCE Multiplayer: ● For a final point regarding Halo CE, in multiplayer, blood removal and corpse behavior from the campaign persists in all multiplayer modes. Halo 2 Campaign: ● Like with Halo CE, bodies in Halo 2 shrink and seem to disappear when enemies are killed. This behavior remains largely unchanged. Heck, even Tartarus seem to shrink away. ● However, Halo 2 introduces a new mechanic where flood can infect bodies on the ground. Rather than ignore this behavior since those bodies technically never appear, bodies that are scripted to be “infected by the flood” simply pop up. This is because the bodies technically exist, they are just too small to see. As soon as the game changes their state from corpse to actor, they are returned to normal size seemingly springing into existence. This is best illustrated in the mission The Oracle right after the encounter with the Heretic Leader’s holo-drone. ● Moving onto another major change regarding the flood is the complete alteration of the encounter with the Gravemind. While this encounter remains unedited in the vanilla classic cutscene, switching over to anniversary graphics reveals something quite interesting: an entirely different version of this encounter was rendered by Blur specifically for alternate releases. In this updated version, The Gravemind is never shown in his full glory, leaving the audience blind to it’s horrifying display of tentacles, meat, and teeth. H2A Extra: ● Similarly to Halo CE, some of Halo 2’s easter eggs have been affected by the changes mentioned. ● For example, The Rex easter egg in Outskirts lacks its signature blood spatter. When viewing the easter egg in both classic and anniversary, only the shotgun shells and energy sword are visible. ● I was unable to confirm if the Rex present on the mission The Great Journey has been altered, since it is difficult to see in the first place. However, since that easter egg is also written in blood it may have been removed from the game or replaced with a different texture, like the rex easter egg in Halo CE. ● Terminals in Halo 2 Anniversary work in a similar fashion to their CE counterparts sending you off to the abandoned Halo Channel application, meaning that their contents are lost to Chinese players. H2 Classic Multiplayer: ● In Halo 2’s classic multiplayer, corpse behavior works the same as it does in the campaign. H2A Multiplayer: ● Contrary to what you would expect by observing its classic version, the in-game multiplayer scorecard, loadout menu, and button prompts are fully in Chinese during Halo 2 Anniversary multiplayer sessions. Everything from the map location zones to Hill availability has been fully converted to a true Chinese experience. ● Following up on that, Forge also has a fully Chinese interface making it the second mode completely accessible to Chinese users. ● Because Halo 2 Anniversary multiplayer was built using the Halo 4 engine, it has the same corpse behavior as that game, which means that bodies of both elites and spartans will start to disappear and fade away after beginning their ragdoll animation. H2 Closing: ● A couple of things to note about Halo 2’s campaign, I don’t know if it’s just my luck or if I'm simply bad at the game, but I cannot seem to reliably trigger the god despawn on the mission Regret. Others seem to have an easier time, but personally I find the retail experience to be more reliable. That, and online co-op straight up doesn’t work. I could never even get a session started because the game would crash in the final stages of loading missions. Halo 3: ● Halo 3 is the first of the later games in this collection to be coded with a different type of corpse behavior. ● Similarly to H2A multiplayer, bodies disappear and fade away once they begin their ragdoll animation (The Covenant, final room before IWHBYD) instead of shrinking. Notice that the moment Sargent Johnson enters his ragdoll phase and drops the Spartan Laser during the final mission of Halo 3, his body disappears. It’s kind of funny considering he isn’t actually dead yet. ● Another interesting addition to this game’s corpse behavior is the separation of ornaments or auxiliary body parts from the actual corpse. For example: punching and breaking a Grunt’s methane pack will produce a small amount of debris, which maintains its appearance and physics behavior long after the grunt’s body has faded from existence, things like brute helmets and other detachable parts follow this pattern. ● Onto the terminals, normally in Halo 3, when you walk up to a Terminal, you can press a button and read some text contained within the terminal. However, in MCC China, while it does give you a button prompt to interact with the terminal and the achievements for this interaction are obtainable, nothing happens when you actually use the prompt. ● Number fonts and names are displayed differently, and appear to be using a different font that looks like a thicker, more stylized version of the Halo 4 font. ● In game UI elements, such as waypoints also appear in Chinese during the campaign. ● This campaign is fully subtitled in Chinese, even if subtitles are never enabled in the MCC menu. Halo 3 Multiplayer: ● Similarly to Halo 2 Anniversary, Halo 3’s multiplayer and forge are outfitted with a suite of Chinese UI adjustments that make them the third and fourth completely accessible and playable modes for the Chinese audience. Halo 3 Extras: ● Everyone’s favorite talking grunt at the end of the Warthog run during the mission Halo does in fact talk to you in this version of the game. The Chinese audience, however, due to lack of subtitles, doesn’t get the privilege of understanding the dialogue, and can only hear Joseph Staten’s high-pitched voice making fun of the Master Chief. Unfortunately, this is the only significant dialogue we could find in the game that didn’t have subtitles added. This is especially odd, since other easter eggs (such as the Red vs Blue easter eggs in the mission Crow’s Nest) still have subtitles. Halo 4: ● Similarly to Halo 3, Halo 4 seems to have received a more complete localization experience. During Halo 4’s campaign, In-game UI elements, such as waypoints and prompts appear in Chinese and are accompanied by complete Chinese subtitles. ● Corpse behavior remains largely unchanged with all returning actor types, meaning that bodies continue fade away after ragdolling. ● However, this does not affect Prometheans. Watchers and Crawlers still fall apart and Knights still disintegrate. Prometheans in general are largely unaffected by the changes in this version of MCC. ● None of the cutscenes in Halo 4 have been altered despite some of them violating the rules that this localization seems to follow. ● For example, in the mission Composer, the chief can be seen walking over the Lich crew at the beginning of the mission, which are present despite being smoking bodies. Similarly, later in the mission, Tilson is sunburned to a crisp by the composer, exposing her muscle layers and skeleton as she’s composed. Why was this not altered or changed, yet the Gravemind and Proto-Gravemind have been seriously censored? Halo 4 Multiplayer: ● I don’t know why some of those decisions were made, but ultimately I guess that was up to the developers to see what could remain in a game that rated 3 and Up in china. ● Similarly to H2A and Halo 3, Halo 4’s multiplayer and forge are outfitted with a suite of Chinese UI adjustments that make them the final completely accessible and playable modes for the Chinese audience, bringing the total number of completely Chinese multiplayer modes to 6 out of the 8 available. Halo 4 Extras: ● Terminal behavior works the same as the other games, with the now-derelict Halo Channel application being launched upon terminal activation. MCC Differences: ● Now I'd like to shift gears and talk about the MCC application itself instead of the games that reside within it. ● Wasn’t developed by 343 or MCC’s other sister developers. ○ This skew of the game was developed by E-home entertainment, and its a fork of retail MCC that 343 provided around early 2015 ○ You might ask yourself, why bring in yet another developer? 343 already has so many people and studios hard at work developing this game. ○ This isn’t unusual. E-home entertainment is a joint venture between Microsoft and Oriental Pearl Media Group, that is used to prepare and publish games that are released in the Chinese region. This also happens to be the same group Sony China has agreements with to release their products in china so it makes sense that Microsoft would utilize a joint venture like this to launch their Xbox products in the region. ● This version of MCC also happens to have these “Exclusive” placeholder nameplates, because this version of the game was never updated with their correct textures and descriptions. When developing future nameplates for the game, the developers insert these placeholder nameplates to test their functionality before the real nameplates are added to the game. At our best guesses, the nameplates “Crescent Moon” and “Half Moon” represent the first salvo of earnable nameplates added to the game via updates, “Ugly Sweater” and “Put a Ring on It.”, whereas the Full Moon and Moon Eclipse nameplates are placeholders for the Yappening event. You may remember some of these, as these also snuck into the flights for MCC on PC before the final event name plates were properly added to the PC build of the game. It’s interesting to see them in the Chinese version of the game because they actually function. If you sign into a Chinese version of the game with an account that has the final nameplates unlocked, you will be able to access the temporary nameplates in their stead. ● The menus are mostly like what you’d expect and directly mirror their English counterparts, text and all, except for one key place: ● One of the more curious developments we encountered while briskly skimming through these games, was the successful activation of the bandana skull as a modifier in both Halo CE and Halo 2’s campaigns. For those that were unaware, the bandana skull isn’t included with the retail version of MCC and is instead a piece of downloadable content, which to my knowledge was never made available in the Chinese region due to how MCC was distributed. However, if you have a version of the Bandana skull as DLC from your local region, it seems to be compatible with MCC china, unlocking the skull as a selectable modifier. ● Spartan Ops, the one true Sacred Icon of Halo 4, is completely missing, even from the UI with no mention that it even existed. We will miss it and it’s infuriating solo Legendary achievement dearly and will be holding a service for it on Saturday, right after we find Ling Ling’s head. ● Contrary to Spartan Ops however, Halo 3 ODST appears in the in-game menu, controller setup menu, and appears as part of the store page, yet is unavailable, despite the American version of the DLC being installed. When launched, the game will queue up the correct mission, key art and music, yet the game will either freeze or crash because the data technically doesn’t exist to launch it. ● Similarly, the H2A map Remnant, added to MCC in an update, is unplayable, yet is still present and selectable in the menu. Trying to launch a game session with this map selected results in an infinite loading screen or a complete game crash. ● Receiving an invite to this version of the game grants you access to the store page, complete with its Chinese rating and inaccessible purchase options. ● From here, you can access and see the Official Club for this game, which can be both shockingly barren and surprisingly active, depending on which tab you’re in. Make no mistake, this game has a small but vibrant community both on TA and Xbox Live. ● As for Sentinels, their behavior and death animations are unchanged in every game. This is likely because, like Prometheans, they’re mechanical, inorganic beings, so there’s no real sense of death or gore when one is killed as opposed to humans and covenant