This makes me wonder if the Halo Master Chief Collection release on PC will be based on emulation.
- Supposedly the early Xbox One games used a fork/version of DirectX that wasn't ever quite released in that form in Windows 10. Rumors are that has been corrected in the upcoming April Release.
- Also, the early Xbox One games used very different Microsoft Store asset servers/etc. The State of Decay Insider tests seem to indicate that April Release of Windows 10's Microsoft Store can now speak to Xbox asset servers/etc directly. (Indications that the State of Decay game installed from possibly the exact same assets in the April Release as it would on an Xbox One.)
- Finally, early Xbox One games sometimes made assumptions that they ran in lightweight VMs with almost no multitasking (except for Kinect-related restrictions when that was mandatory) and some very specific performance characteristics versus the wild west of available PC hardware. Rumors abound that Hyper-V improvements in Windows 10 solve some of the VM/multitasking issues. Leaving only, perhaps, the need to test on a variety of PC hardware configurations.
Obviously, a lot of speculation there. Presumably a lot more information will surface as the April Release happens and as E3 approaches.
Supposedly a true x64 port of the multiple generations of the Halo engines was an important goal of the 343 team to feel that they knew the engines inside and out, and had a good handle on using that engine for Halo 5 to give a longer lead time on their next engine. (Halo Infinite [6] supposedly will use a brand new engine codenamed "Slipspace".)
Other signs that MCC was most likely a very "proper" port of the engines to x64 include some of the ways bugs riddled the early post-launch phases, especially in multiplayer code.