Halo Reach is heading for its PC launch date on 3rd December with some VFR issues, as it stands.
343 Industries shared its concerns with confining the game to 60FPS early on in November, indicating that it would prefer to pursue an uncapped frame rate.
“In the current flight, we were able to further test our experimental implementation and the feature does not meet our quality expectations”, Community Support & Engagement Coordinator Tyler David said at the time. “From our learnings we’re currently investigating and working on fundamental improvements. When we have a solution that meets our quality bar we will first flight it with the community before releasing it more broadly.”
343 Industries has now provided an update on attempts to utilise its “experimental implementation” of variable frame rate for Halo Reach, and despite some ongoing problems, has decided to launch the game with VFR.
“In the last PC flight, we were able to further test our experimental implementation of variable frame rate (VFR) and the feature does not meet our quality expectations”, 343 wrote. “We always knew and stated that some of these features would be a bit dicey given that the underlying games are old (9 years in this case) and were designed to run at 30FPS on a fixed platform (Xbox 360). The way VFR was built for Halo: Reach on PC created a variety of negative side effects and issues ranging from increased mouse input delay (which is the opposite of what should happen) to instability. The team has been hard at work on fundamental improvements which are showing very promising results in Ring 1/2 flighting.
“We know this is a very important feature for the community, and with some recent refinements, VFR will be included at launch. Based on the recent improvements receiving positive feedback, we wanted players to have the option to use the experimental VFR option on Day 1. We look forward to your feedback and will continue to monitor this closely post-launch.”
They will certainly get some feedback.
Wireframe #27 is out now
