Late last year, 343 Industries began winding down development on Halo: The Master Chief Collection after almost a decade of major updates, and at the time, fans were concerned about the future of the collection and where things would go from here. Well, now the community is seeing some troubling 'ban' messages pop up in-game that could be the fault of hackers.
Posting online, one Halo: MCC player was "temporarily banned" from matchmaking, with a warning message popping up in the menus. The post claims that this was a hacker taking their account offline, and 343 has now responded to this whole scenario on Reddit.
Here's what this 343 dev had to say:
"Hey folks, just wanted to pop in and say that our support and safety team takes these reports seriously and have been actively investigating these as they are reported to them.
If, as part of the investigation, it is determined we need some sort of development effort on our end to shore up future problems, we will have that discussion and determine what is feasible for us to commit to."
That statement certainly sounds like the team's ability to go back in and start major update work on Halo: MCC is limited these days, but at least we have some sort of confirmation that the issue is being looked into. Hopefully things get sorted and most of us never run into ban messages like this through no fault of our own!
As for what else 343 is busy with right now, they have a few plates spinning over there at the moment. The team is still delivering Halo Infinite updates, and it also looks like work on the next Halo game is kicking into gear at the Xbox studio.