I waited a good decade for this to finally happen after years of riding off the PC ports of CE and H2V and plenty of wishful thinking playing these on friends' Xboxs. Albeit the wait for each title to drop in chronological order was concerning, but understandable when porting console exclusives. Much as this is a great and accessible way to play most of Bungie's Halo games 1 to Reach on PC, this isn't a well kept collection by its devs nor some of the fans.
The multiplayer is managed by the terrible Easy Anti-Cheat that stands up to nothing that cheaters are using to completely break matchmaking, game engine quirks like forced post-processing effects and an outdated FSR that 343i still hasn't been addressed, the forum community is upheld by terrible moderators that work against you for addressing said problems; not only with the game but modding community as well, and a terrible netcode that still makes cooperative feel terrible with delays that don't affect the host. It makes the Halo scene feel like a sinking ship with more holes than boards to repair it as a result of poor management from 343i and Microsoft higher-ups as well as terrible community members who use the IP to inflate their images and egos than actually preserve the games.
On a positive note, they games are great when played in 4K and a high FPS with extended graphical features over the Xbox version and weapon offsets for less "in your face" viewmodels or a chance to replicate your favorite Halo across games. (Imo, it needs more values as it's slightly restrictive in how far the offsets are.)
If you want a more well-kept multiplayer service, [url=https://www.eldewrito.org/]ElDewrito[/url] was revived in 2024 with a faithfully restored H3 multiplayer built off of the abandoned Russian PC port, Halo Online, support for Firefight and Campaign modes, big modding potential to bring ODST and Reach to the game, and tons of QoL features and settings to shape to game to your preference. CE and Halo 2 equivalents provide Custom Edition with the latest patch and [url=https://github.com/SnowyMouse/chimera]Chimera[/url] and [url=https://www.cartographer.online/]Project Cartographer.[/url] (Of course, you must legally own these games first before considering alternatives.) You will need to go out of your way to acquire and mod these games, but the end result is more satisfyingly faithful experience.
