Today during an hour-long 343 Social Stream on Mixer, we got the first glimpse of the upcoming PC version of Halo: The Master Chief Collection. 343 Industries showed off a small demo of Halo: Reach today, the first game from the collection that is headed to the new platform. On the embedded Mixer VOD above, the action starts at around 13 minutes in.
The demo was from a single campaign mission, Tip of the Spear, and the developers were quick to explain that some of the Xbox controller prompts that appeared while it"s in progress was because this is an older development build. E3 attendees will be able to get hands-on time with the same mission themselves, but on a much newer build with full PC UI elements and other features.
It was also confirmed that Reach won"t be available for play across Microsoft storefronts during E3, as the events listing page that was discovered saying otherwise had been a mistake.
The long-time-coming Insider Flighting for Reach will be kicking off "very, very soon" according to 343, planned for sometime in June exclusively through Steam. Although no specific dates were shared, there"s a good chance of Microsoft launching the Insider testing phase during its E3 showcase next month as a surprise.
Moreover, the studio reiterated during the stream that split-screen play and modding support for the Master Chief Collection on PC are being looked at as post-launch updates, as bringing over 11 engines over to a new platform is taking up most of the development team"s time.
As Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be coming out piecemeal on PC - starting with Reach -, players will get the chance to buy each title as it comes out with a full collection purchase option available once all of the games have released. Pricing details should come out during E3.
UPDATE: The stream is now available on YouTube as well over here.