Just a couple days ago, a big list of games were added to the Xbox Game Pass subscription.

Among those titles was the newly remastered Halo: The Master Chief Collection which includes Halo: Combat Evolved along with Halo 2, 3 and 4.

Note: Halo 3: ODST is a separate download/add-on.

If you are an Xbox Game Pass subscriber and crank up this download you might be in for a bit of bandwidth sticker shock when you see the total download is more than 70GB. For me, on a 1TB monthly bandwidth download allowance, this is nearly 10% of my monthly allowance.

Luckily, the folks at 343 Industries had some consideration when it comes to eating up the end users bandwidth and have implemented an Intelligent Delivery option to help you manage the bandwidth hit for Halo: MCC.

After the initial download begins and gets through about the first 3GB or so, you will get the familiar Ready to Start notification on your console. Open up Halo: MCC at this point and follow these steps to trim down your bandwidth by not installing different games or game elements immediately.

From the main menu select Options & Career and then Settings. Using the LB/RB move over to the Gameplay tab and then select Change Installed Games and you will see all of the Halo: MCC games and their download progress.

Using your controller you can opt out of downloading the campaign or multi-player module for each game. By selecting to opt out of both of those for a game – that will prevent that game from being downloaded for now. If you just want to play the campaign mode in each game – toggle off the multiplayer modules. That saved me over 20GB of bandwidth. If you want to just download the games one at a time – then toggle off campaign and multiplayer for the other titles. This will maximize your bandwidth savings for now and once you finish that game you can come back to this menu and download the next one.

This Intelligent Delivery option really provides a lot of options to help you manage the massive 73GB package that would be downloaded by default.

I have been testing Halo: MCC as part of the MCC Insider Program on Xbox One and the visual enhancements upgrade to HDR and 4K are just superb. That is also why this new collection is so massive – an entirely upgraded set of graphics.

You can easily see the difference as well – just take a look at the before and after images I included in the gallery below – you can easily see the visual improvements if you have compatible hardware.

Enjoy the new view of the Halo universe.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection Before and After Screenshots