If you have seen our NXE Install Chart, you may have noticed that installing Halo 3 to the hard drive will actually make the game run slower. Now, while lesser game developers would cry hogwash and try to make excuses, Bungie has a very surprisingly honest message for their fans: Yeah, it does.

The “New Xbox Experience” was released today and one of the new features allows you to “install” your games to the HDD. While you still have to keep the original disc in the tray, installing to the HDD can make some games perform a little better while also putting a little less wear-and-tear on your DVD drive. However, this isn’t to say that ALL games will see optimizations from being installed. In fact, in the case of Halo 3, the game will actually see increased loading times. Several websites have reported the results of tests to gauge how some games perform after being installed to the HDD for Halo 3 and their tests indicate that in some cases, the load times are significantly longer. Our own internal investigations have yielded similar results.

Bungie went into a full, detailed explanation as to why Halo 3 suffers when installed on the 360 hard drive. Thankfully, for those of us who are either technologically inept or just too damn tired to read a wall of text, Bungie proceeded to give a “tl;dr” explanation as well:

The technical reasons were outlined above, but for a higher level answer, we shipped Halo 3 before Microsoft finalized this particular feature. As a result, we were not able to take advantage of it (or any other potential optimizations we discovered after shipping Halo 3). Perhaps we also coded too close to the metal.

Finally, the issue of a future patch to allow the game to better utilize the NXE install feature was brought up. Bungie’s response, in short: Don’t count on it anytime soon.

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