Halo: Reach on Xbox One gets delayed as 343 Industries deals with memory issues

After 343 Industries shipped the first Halo: Reach Insider flight on PC a month ago, we were wondering when Halo Insiders on Xbox One would be able to test the remastered version of Halo: Reach. Unfortunately, the first Xbox flight has been delayed as 343 Industries is currently working on memory issues affecting the Xbox One version of Halo: MCC.

In the latest MCC Development update published on Halo Waypoint yesterday, 343 Industries explained that the work being done with Unreal Engine 4 to create new character customization options as well as the new progression system is really pushing the Xbox One to its limits. As a result, flighting on Xbox will be delayed until the developers manage to solve some unexpected memory issues.

You can read the team’s detailed explanation below:

As has been stated previously, making any game is hard, let alone where you’re dealing with 11 game engines and 7 complete games under the roof of one title sharing the same hardware resources.

One key goal that has been a part of bringing Halo: Reach into MCC is that for Xbox One, the team has been attempting to bring UE4 online for new character customization options on Xbox. You can read more about the progression system in the May and June development updates. This however has proved to be quite challenging as MCC was already close to memory limits running on the original Xbox One consoles. Bringing the entire progression and customization system into MCC also requires memory to be used to run the additional UE4 engine. Currently, a lot of progress has been made in getting it up and running, but the title still is not within memory constraints to properly run on the Xbox One. In order to flight on Xbox One, we need to be within these limits, otherwise instability will be an issue.

Until the team has an adequate solve for this unique issue, flighting on the Xbox One will continue to be delayed. That being said, the team is pushing hard on a solution as they want to flight the Xbox One build as soon as possible. Until then though flighting will continue to remain solely on the PC build.

As we’re nearing the end of this console generation, the Xbox One hardware is definitely starting to show its age. To be fair, Halo: MCC is quite an exception as it bundles together seven Halo games using different engines, and the Xbox One anthology has been plagued by issues since launch. Expectations about the PC version of Halo: MCC are also very high, and 343 Industries is now readying the next PC flight which will include the game’s campaign. There’s still no ETA for the next PC Insider build, but the team promised to share more details soon.