Halo Reach feature

343 Industries plans to launch the next Halo: Reach PC insider flighting, Firefight, later this month


Last month, 343 Industries and Microsoft launched the first flighting for the PC version of Halo: Reach. And today, 343 Industries announced that it plans to launch the next flighting for the Halo: The Master Chief Collection PC later this month.

This next flighting will offer Firefight matchmaking to gamers/insiders on the PC. Now while the team aims to launch this next PC flighting in July 2019, there is a chance things may not go according to 343 Industries’ plans.

“While things may shift, we’re currently targeting this milestone for later this month. The team is beginning to review release candidates that have the core features to support this flight. Keep your eyes out for upcoming news articles in the near future!”

343 Industries has also shared some interesting details about the first PC flighting. According to the team, this first public flight was designed to help test various amounts of hardware specifications and the delivery pipelines we are using for the Halo Insider program.

“The user group invited to this flight was a very small slice of those who had registered with the Halo Insider program. Of those invited, we saw over 60% of users download and play. This number was quite high given the limited messaging on Twitter (the announce) and one invite email sent to the group.Compared to the number of participants, the number of times people booted up and played was very high. With this being such a limited flight, we were not expecting this. When the next flight comes online, we are eager to see if this trend continues for firefight.On conclusion of the flight, a survey was sent out as follow-up. Questions ranged from the more generic, ‘what is your s experience with Halo’ to more granular questions around how the game felt on PC using mouse and keyboard. One of the last questions that was asked was around how fun their experience was on a scale of 1 (“Not fun at all”) to 5 (“Very fun”). Survey responses were overwhelmingly positive with most players rating their experience very high. Some of the most common feedback we received was how much fun it was on PC along with hearing repeatedly, “Take your time on development.” Both of these sentiments have been very encouraging. All teams are hard at work on development and are looking forward to sharing more of our progress in future flights!”