343 Industries has revealed that Halo: The Master Chief Collection is now playable on Steam Deck. In addition to the campaign, this includes support for modes that require Easy Anti-Cheat, such as multiplayer and custom games.
The announcement was made on the official Halo Twitter account. In the video, you see Halo MCC start-up on a Steam Deck surrounded by a bunch of Halo memorabilia.
343 Industries has asked that if you run into any problems while playing on Steam Deck, capture it via screenshot or record and submit a Flag Report ticket. 343 won’t be able to “provide troubleshooting for Steam Deck-related issues submitted in a Bug Report ticket.”
Halo MCC isn’t the only playable Halo title on Steam Deck. Previous titles such as Halo Wars: Definitive Edition and Halo: Spartan Strike are Steam Deck verified. Although Halo Infinite isn’t verified, you can still play it on Steam Deck.
Listed below are the known issues for the Steam Deck:
When launching Halo: The Master Chief Collection on Steam Deck, selecting one of the available Anti-Cheat launch options will result in the game launching with the opposite launch option. For example, selecting “Anti-Cheat Disabled” will result in MCC launching with Anti-Cheat enabled.
- Until this issue is resolved in a future update, players on Steam Deck must select the “Anti-Cheat Disabled” launch option to access multiplayer matchmaking and the Custom Game Browser.
(Developers Note)
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve been working with both Valve and EAC to enable anti-cheat-enabled gameplay on Steam Deck. During the course of this work, we reached a point where the launch behavior is as you see now, where the launch options behave opposite their descriptions. This emergent behavior occurred without any changes to the game executable itself. It’s a result of differences in initialization on Windows vs. Linux. Things that are guaranteed to occur on Windows don’t always occur on Linux, and things that can’t happen on Windows can and sometimes do happen on Linux. Since the game was coded with only Windows in mind, the code does not explicitly account for any of the Linux behavior.
We can change the game initialization to behave the same way on both Windows and Linux and indeed, we’ve already done so internally. However, these and other associated Steam Deck changes require more comprehensive test passes before they can be released. We know our players have been eager to play in matchmaking and participate in custom game browser games, so we chose to release this small update sooner in order to unlock these experiences. As we noted with this release, we expect to provide further improvements for Steam Deck compatibility in a future update.
- Shortly after being removed from or leaving a party with other players via the Roster menu, players on Steam Deck may experience Halo: The Master Chief Collection freezing or crashing.
- Players on Steam Deck are unable to play Campaign Co-op or Spartan Ops with players on PC or Xbox consoles. Attempting to do so may result in players accessing gameplay; however, all sessions will eventually experience a “Connection Interrupted” error or a similar disconnection.
- Campaign Co-op and Spartan Ops will function as expected if all players in the group are playing on Steam Deck.
- Before playing input-restricted matchmaking on Steam Deck, players may need to change their preferred input device in-game to Gamepad.
To do this:
- Launch Halo: MCC.
- Select Options & Career from the main menu.
- Select Settings.
- Under the Control tab, switch the Preferred Input Device to Gamepad.
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