Another round of Halo: The Master Chief Collection testing—or "flighting," as developer 343 Industries calls it—got underway earlier this week, and with those wheels now spinning in earnest the studio has posted an update on what it's doing, how it's going, and what PC players can expect when Halo: Reach, the first part of the Master Chief Collection, finally goes live.

After recapping the content and schedule of the current round of testing, the update goes into detail about how crossplay and cross-platform progression will work in Halo: Reach. Crossplay between the Steam and Windows 10 versions of the game will be supported, but crossplay between PC and Xbox will not. Campaign progress will be shared across platforms, with some limitations: Mission and playlist completions will be retained and shared across all platforms, but mid-mission checkpoints and partial playlist completions will not. Stats tracking, like leaderboards, medals, and achievements, are shared, while Reach customization and PlayerID unlocks are "special cases": They're retained in your Xbox Live profile, but you might have to re-equip them on new platforms.

It's a little confusing, so 343 made a chart:

The update also has a preliminary rundown of the minimum system requirements for Halo Reach on Steam. 343 said that it's still in the process of testing integrated graphics options and will share more detailed specs down the road, and warned that the requirements for the Windows Store version will be "slightly different" than those of Steam.

The PC version of Halo: Reach will also support adjustable FOV, windowed mode with adjustable resolution and aspect ratio, V-sync, HUD anchoring (I don't know what that is), and a framerate limiter as an "experimental" setting.

Halo: Reach on PC still doesn't have a release date, but when last we looked it was expected to be out by the end of 2019. The schedule for the remaining play sessions in the current round of testing is below.

October 31, 10:00 AM PT - 1:00 PM PT & 5:00 PM PT - 9:00 PM PT

• Social: 4v4
• Competitive: Team Hardcore
• Firefight: Arcade

November 1, 10:00 AM PT - 1:00 PM PT & 5:00 PM PT - 9:00 PM PT

• Social: 2v2
• Competitive: Invasion
• Firefight: Arcade

November 2, 10:00 AM PT - 1:00 PM PT & 5:00 PM PT - 9:00 PM PT

• Social: 4v4
• Competitive: Team Hardcore
• Firefight: Arcade

November 3, 10:00 AM PT - 1:00 PM PT & 5:00 PM PT - 9:00 PM PT

• Social: 8v8
• Competitive: Team Hardcore
• Firefight: Heroic

November 4, 10:00 AM PT - 1:00 PM PT & 5:00 PM PT - 9:00 PM PT

• Social: 4v4
• Competitive: Team Hardcore
• Firefight: Arcade

November 5, 10:00 AM PT - 1:00 PM PT

• Social: 8v8
• Competitive: Team Hardcore
• Firefight: Heroic

343 Industries has flicked the switch and turned on Halo: The Master Chief Collection's third PC test, or "flight" as they insist on calling it. It's available via Steam for invited Insiders and will run until November 5.

Insiders—you can sign up for free membership here—have quite a lot of things to put through their paces, including a pair of Reach campaign missions, heroic and regular 4-player Firefights on a trio of maps, three social game modes, Reach Team Hardcore and Reach Invasion. Check out the full list below. 

Campaign missions 

• Halo: Reach campaign: Noble Actual and Winter Contingency.

Firefight matchmaking

• 4-player Heroic standard Firefight: will be played on Beachhead, Corvette, and Holdout.
• 4-player Normal grab bag Firefight: will be played on Beachhead, Corvette, and Holdout.

Multiplayer matchmaking

• 2v2 Social: Slayer, Flag and Bomb, Zone Control, and Asset Denial will be played on maps Countdown, Powerhouse, and Zealot.
• 4v4 Social: Slayer, Flag and Bomb, Zone Control, Asset Denial, Action Sack, Swat, and Snipers will be played on Countdown, Powerhouse, Zealot, and Tempest.
• 8v8 Social: Slayer, Flag and Bomb, Zone Control, Asset Denial, Action Sack, and Snipers will be played on Tempest, Breakpoint, and Ridgeline.
• Halo: Reach Team Hardcore: Slayer and Capture the Flag will be played on maps Countdown and Zealot.
• Halo: Reach Invasion: Invasion will be played on the map Breakpoint.

The first invites have been sent out now and if you've received one, you can dive in straight away. Today, 343 is testing 8v8 Social, Team Hardcore and the Heroic Firefight modes. 

More invites will be sent out in the next couple of days, too. 343 will be testing the Windows 10 version of the game on the Microsoft Store and the Windows 7 version on Steam, so it will be inviting the relevant Insiders. Keep an eye on your inbox if that's you. 

There still no release date for The Master Chief Collection. Reach is the first game set to appear, and there were hints that the entire collection would appear before the end of the year, but with November on our doorstep and none of them released, that's looking very unlikely. 

A public test for Halo: The Master Chief Collection's Firefight horde mode was supposed to come to PC in July, but it ultimately failed to materialize. The short explanation for the delay was "bugs"; the long version is also "bugs," but with an in-depth explanation of the Halo testing hierarchy, the current status of the Firefight mode on PC, and why it all seems so complicated.

343 opted to hold back the testing due to "blocking bugs" that it simply could not get past before the end of the month. "'Blocking Bugs' are 'blockers' in that they are deemed severe enough to prevent a flight from functioning as needed," 343 explained in a new Insider Update. 

"Keep in mind that though we address, mitigate and solve 'blocking bugs' for each ring of flighting, this doesn’t mean that any flight is bug-free. In fact, it’s quite the contrary since each flight is very much a work-in-progress development build."

"Rings," as 343 explains it, are essentially Halo-speak for milestones: Each ring must be passed without blocking bugs in order for a "flight" to move on to the next. Ring 0 is made up of an internal 343 team, ring 1 is "external partners that work closely with the studio," ring 2 brings in even more external partners, and ring 3 is the Halo Insider Group, selected based on "Key Performance Indicators" to test various aspects of game.

"At the time of writing this, we have just completed our first Ring 1 test for Halo: Reach FireFlight [what 343 is calling the Firefight flight, apparently, because why just call it a "test" when you can be unnecessarily confusing instead] on PC. Late last week, the team resolved the final key issue that had been blocking entering Ring 1 and now has a few bugs being worked on that are blocking Ring 2," 343 wrote. "There are currently five Ring 2 blockers, and fifteen Ring 3 blockers the team is working through:"

• Security solution does not auto-install once game is installed
• Long delays in menus accompanied by matchmaking errors can happen
• Opening the settings menu during gameplay can cause the roster to stay stuck on screen
• Frame loss can be experienced in various menus when played in higher resolutions.
• Crash is present sometimes when a matchmade Firefight game starts

Once the flight gets to ring 2, other bugs relating to navigation, crashes, and other issues will have to be dealt with before it can go to Halo Insiders. No date for that has been set: 343 said only that "flighting has moved out slightly," and the next round will take place "when it's ready."

"When we announced MCC coming to PC and Reach coming to MCC, we thought we knew exactly what the roadmap was to bring about the best game for gamers. We were wrong about a few things and this is something that happens often in the complex, fluid world of game development. To compensate for this, schedules around flighting had to be shifted out," 343 wrote. "But, even with these challenges, the development team has overcome them and is continuing to work on it day-in and day-out towards bringing MCC to PC and Halo: Reach to MCC the right way."

Halo: The Master Chief Collection will be released as individual games in chronological order, beginning later this year with Halo: Reach.

Correction: The post originally referred to the Halo developer as Bungie in two places. As absolutely everyone on the planet (including me) knows, Halo has been under the care and control of 343 Industries since 2012. Sorry about that.

343 Industries admits its July development update for the Master Chief Collection doesn't deliver much new information. But we do get a visual on ultrawide monitor resolutions, and better yet, a silly roundup of bugs that 343 says won't make it to launch day.

In the blog post, 343 shows pictures of the MCC running on ultrawide monitors as part of the customization options that it plans to bring to PC players. The above screenshot shows the game HUD centered on the screen while the second image in the post shows the HUD spread out to fill the corners of the screen. A centered HUD may look slightly less sleek but it sure is a lot less distance for your eyes to cover in a split second.

The blog post also has a section that shares videos of the best bugs found by the team during development. There are six in the blog post but I have to agree on the #1 pick by the developers: the worst checkpoint.

Few things are worse than pushing yourself to a checkpoint only to get stuck in an inescapable death loop. Fortunately, this is definitely a bug, not a feature. So we should be able to count on not getting stuck in this particular trap when we play.

The entire Master Chief Collection is expected to release by the end of 2019. Check out everything we know about it at that link.