At X019 343 Industries revealed that development of Halo: Reach for PC was coming to its conclusion. The game, which will be released both standalone and as part of Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC, officially launches on December 3. The game would arrive in 2019, just as promised. But while a release date is set and 343 Industries sounds confident in its plans, it's also admitting that some PC-specific features may not be ready in time for launch.
In a post-X019 news post to the Halo Waypoint community hub, 343 community manager Postums offered up an update on where the game currently stood. The post details ongoing issues, plans going forward, and topics of which were of concern to the community. One specific topic stood out, given that Halo: Reach coming to PC is expected to offer basic PC features. Nevertheless, 343 admits that the game currently has a locked cap of 60fps and that it's unclear if that will change. "When we have a solution that meets our quality bar we will first flight it with the community before releasing it more broadly."
The 60fps locked frame rate isn't the only other PC-specific issue given attention in the post, either. Other problems brought up include audio issues due to having to chance encoding for PC, leading to the game sounding different. There also appear to be some problems with mouse and keyboard input delay, though 343 Industries is testing certain fixes to improve this before launch. If necessary, they'll continue updating the issue post-launch. Finally, some issues with V-sync have also been noted.
Also significant, and gameplay affecting, is 343's decision to implement controller aim assist on PC. While 343 is "investigating the best way to handle input types," the decision to continue supporting auto-aim when using a controller on PC won't be changing. This is because doing so would "essentially close the door on implementing cross-play between Xbox and PC down the road." 343's priority is building a healthy population for matchmaking.
While PC gaming enthusiasts will certainly be frustrated to hear there are some issues with the port, particularly with the frame rate cap, there has to be an extent of empathy, too. Halo: Reach is almost 10 years old and was developed from the ground up for a console and not PC. Porting it to PC has got to be a challenging development project, let alone optimizing it to the point that it's indistinguishable from a normal PC release.
Halo: Reach releases December 3 on PC.