There are still a few weeks to go before Halo Reach arrives on PC, but players have already started modding the game. 343 Industries community lead Brian Jarrard said that within an hour of the first Halo Reach test flight going live, players were changing how the game worked.
“The speed at which people have started to mod and tinker already has been really cool,” Jarrard told us at XO19. “It took them maybe an hour from the first flight to start changing weapon behaviours, making players that could jump and fly.”
Jarrard said he even saw one instance of a player-created nightmare contraption like something out of Mad Max.
“I saw somebody who had just mashed a bunch of vehicles together and created this new abomination that had all the weapons attached to it,” he said. “We knew that was going to happen, I just don’t think we knew it would happen within an hour of the flight going up.”
The team at 343 Industries says they welcome modders and have been looking forward to this aspect of launching Reach on PC.
“One of the coolest parts about PC is it’s an open-ended platform,” Jarrard said. “My perfect world is, you put these games out in a great baseline experience that’s true to the originals, and then the community takes the keys at that point and they make it their own.”
There are a few provisos, of course: as a competitive multiplayer game, Halo Reach will need some limitations in place to make sure the online experience stays free of mods.
“In matchmaking, we’re not going to allow custom content, just to sort of protect the integrity of the core experience,” Jarrard said. “Outside of that? We want fans to tinker, create their own experiences, play custom games.”
“Who knows what Reach on PC will look like years from now?” he said. “I’m excited.”
Halo Reach will arrive on PC December 3. It’s the first part of The Master Chief Collection.