Halo: The Master Chief Collection is already a mammoth catalogue of games containing all of the Bungie- era Halo titles and more, but it's about to get even bigger on PC. As part of the team's 'Digsite' project, 343 has shown off a bunch of old archived Halo goodies that are being re-worked for MCC on PC.
There's loads of stuff in here, from near-complete multiplayer maps that weren't included in Halo: Combat Evolved to prototype weaponry that was left on the cutting room floor at Bungie. It's fascinating stuff and gives us a real glimpse at the sheer breadth of content that just never makes it into retail games due to the complex nature of development.
Two old maps are coming in this first 'Digsite Delivery'; Indoor/Underground and Dusk/Abyss. The former was worked on by Gearbox Software and was 'the most complete' map here, while the latter "was rough to say the least" according to the team working on bringing it over.
There are more maps being converted too, and this is clearly a long-term project being worked on by 343 and a group of talented modders who are navigating the troubles of bringing old, cutting room floor content to a modern Halo collection.
If you want to see more of what's been found in the archives, and read more about how the team is working to bring things over, check out 343's full blog post for more details. We'd love for some of this content to make its way to the Xbox version of Halo: MCC one day - it's super cool stuff.
For now though, the team will be adding the first wave of cut Halo content to GitHub and the Steam Workshop when the next Master Chief Collection PC update arrives. Oh, and another blog post is coming this week that'll unveil even more goodies, "from the E3 2003 demo of Halo 2, to the Guardians cut from Halo 3". We're very intrigued to see more!