Halo: The Master Chief Collection's first mod tools are out now, alongside the season 7 update
Halo is about to get weird
Today is an exciting time for those of you who like Halo rebalanced, tweaked, or completely cursed. Developers 343 Industries just released modding tools for the Master Chief Collection along with the season 7 update. They're only for the MCC's version of Halo: Combat Evolved but will enable you edit all the values in the game, should you be brave enough to mess with the Silent Cartographer’s glorious flow.
The tools are based on the Halo Editing Kit from the original 2003 release of Combat Evolved, so people familiar with that can start modding and porting content. There are a number of programs folded into the package. 'Guerilla' lets you edit all the values or tags in the game, meaning you can change colours, weapon values, even what trees spawn in certain levels. 'Sapien' is where you take all these tweaked terrors and place them in the level. You don’t even need to own MCC, as the mod tools ship with a development build of the game. If you're into all that, you can grab them from Steam.
And now I get to talk about Cursed Halo. This is what I want brought over from the original modding scene. Cursed Halo is art. It’s a mod that undermines every single cool thing the game does. It has a wobbly sniper rifle that doesn’t zoom in, a sedan Warthog, a flame-thrower that's full of water. On and on it goes, culminating in the D20 frag grenade. In multiplayer, it rolls its own damage between 1 and 200. But in single-player it rolls a huge number of effects, like spawning enemies or planting trees. Watch. Desire. Download.
MCC season 7 launched, too. The usual tiered customisation options are part of the update, letting you colour your energy sword if you so desire. I’m way more interested in the first release of the custom game browser that lets players of Halo: Reach define rules for their own multiplayer match-ups.
I’m so glad Microsoft fell in love with PC gaming again. This is good stuff.