343 Industries delivered some good news today for Halo fans on the Steam Deck. An update that hit the Halo: The Master Chief Collection (MCC) on Steam today enables a highly requested feature: matchmaking support on Valve's handheld gaming PC.
While games in the collection have been playable for some time now on the Steam Deck, what's missing has been any online features. This had been due to the game's anti-cheat solution 'Easy Anti-Cheat' causing issues on the Linux-based handheld. Without it, multiplayer matchmaking, Custom Game Browser, online co-op, and achievements had been missing as features, until now.
343 Industries also confirmed it is working on further optimizations to MCC for enhancing Steam Deck compatibility in future updates. However, there are a few known issues with this update specifically for Steam Deck users:
Amusingly, users will still need to select "Anti-Cheat Disabled” when launching MCC on the Steam Deck, as the options are somehow flipped for now. Campaign co-op and Spartan Ops are also only playable with other Steam Deck users, and attempting to connect to PC or Xbox users will error out. Lastly, the game may freeze or crash after leaving a party with other players remaining.
The Halo: The Master Chief Collection update carrying this change for the Steam Deck is now available via Steam. It is only a 6MB download as well.
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