Microsoft say they are ‘aware’ that there are problems with Halo: Reach. A number of fans have found that their Xbox 360 will not read the disc at all and according to one unsubstantiated post on MaxConsole there are ‘queues’ of people at stores waiting to exchange discs. Microsoft say they are currently investigating and are ‘looking to address the problem.’
In a separate issue, owners of an Xbox 360 without a hard drive – including the new slim models – have found that they cannot play the co-op mode and Firefight as a hard drive is required for his feature. Apparently the 4GB flash drive in the 360 S is not recognised by Reach as a hard drive. Microsoft say they are working on a fix for this as well.
simplebob
Wonder if theyll use this to boost their stats for copies of the game shipped out? Feel sorry for anyone affected, has to be one of the most anticipated titles this year for the 360, would be gutted if this happened to, for example, GT5….
JoshHood
I was up at Game before work yesterday, and there were two guys in front of me both swapping discs. I hadn’t heard about it until then though.
STILLCANTTHINKOFAGOODPSNNAME
fuk me, the biggest game xbox has and they didn’t even check to see if it works
Juelz345
You do realize that this isn’t an issue for everyone with the game right? Just read the comments in this post alone and you’ll find more comment from people who’s work fine than of those who don’t.
Mind, it is a pretty messed up situation, but to say that they didn’t check to see if the game works is a bit of an exaggeration.
Unfortunately, a lot of games (including Sony’s) launch with issues, some more drastic than others. The 20 or so people that these developers have doing QA can’t compare to the millions of people in the real world.
I got my copy on Monday, and i haven’t had any issues.
Tuffcub
The “Doesnt work with Xbox 4g Slims” is a universal issue and a pretty major cock up. That really should of been caught in QA.
dpb135
See fanboys having fun with this!!
Just ordered my copy, £38 from tesco.com with 2100 ms points also :) hope I don’t get these issues.
Klart
‘looking to address the problem’ you better just plain fix it!
hazelam
ms QA strikes again.
Apnomis
It’s nice to see it’s not just Sony that are hit by gremlins and last minute hiccups with their major releases! There must be some majorily p*ssed of Halo fanboys around the Country if they got one of these dodgy discs (especially if they’re one of the silly buggers that paid hundreds for it just to get it a day or two earlier!).
I’m surprised MS have taken the decision to make a HDD compulsory for sections of arguably their biggest game release though, given their past stance on the use of HDD’s to run disc games…
hazelam
that’s not the first game to require a hard drive though, there was the football manager game, but that was a very niche product, and then burnout paradise needed a hdd.
jimmy-google
The disc issue does appear to be that wide spread but the hard drive problem with 4GB 360 is a big miss.
I just wonder if sometimes developers get so focused on hitting deadlines that testing is allow to slip a bit so they make them.
cc_star
Loads of big games sadly get hit by problems, ones at the top of my mind were Far Cry 2, Fallout 3 (and half its DLC) and of course Heavy Rain
hazelam
but the slim arcade issue isn’t a sporadic bug, they really should have caught that one.
they should have tested the game with all the available configurations, and not just “it starts up, that’s an ok on that machine”
cc_star
Neither was Fallout3 crashing when the PS3 received a notification – that happened 100% of the time and should never have been certified by Sony, but it was.
Both companies need to do more to stamp out problems, but I cynically think a critical bug and a launch day patch is a good tool to combat piracy.
Quinlank
“Neither was Fallout3 crashing when the PS3 received a notification – that happened 100% of the time and should never have been certified by Sony, but it was.”
Completely untrue. I and several others I know played Fallout 3 to death before the patches for it started showing up after launch and not once did I ever see or hear about it crashing when notifications were received.
Did the game crash a lot? Sure did, but the notification issue caused the picture to distort pre initial patch. That’s not nearly the same thing as crashing “100 percent of the time”.
jimmy-google
Like a lot of the bugs that creep through these ones don’t appear to effect everyone (I had no issues with Heavy Rain either). Some games get odd problems like the LittleBigPlanet issue with one of the tracks.
The hard drive issue with Reach is fairly basic and effects every one of the consoles with the drive in it. Which makes it a bit more of balls up than most.
gazzagb
Not good from MS, but every game that is released these days have problems.
Boomshanks
Yes but for such a AAA title to have such a fundamental flaw is pretty bad. Same with Heavy Rain. I truly do not understand how these things don’t get picked up during testing.
An absolute shame for those who can’t wait to play the game only to find that it won’t work.
Radboud
Heavy Rain worked perfectly fine for me from day 1. So it is kinda a different thing as the fundamental flaw of “do not recognize HDD”-issue in the Slim Arcade though.
But indeed, QA should be better, although 100% testing is undoable. Ive got the same thing with applications I build. You can test anything you want, but there will always be a specific situation, somehwere, where it might fail or have delimited functionality.
With games, the above has an even higher chance, as the userbase is many times larger than any business-userbase might be.
Quinlank
Didn’t Heavy Rain have a patch available on launch day that fixed most of the problems? Hardly the same thing as what’s happening here.