Halo Online is Russia only and Microsoft is enforcing it

Apr 3, 2015 12:35 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has started taking action against Halo fans who are making mods that enable people outside of Russia to download and play the game's current beta stage. The company wants to ensure that the free-to-play online shooter can actually be played only in Russia, and not in other parts of the world.

Halo Online was revealed to the world last month, much to the surprise of the franchise's millions of fans from all over the world. The title, a free-to-play online first-person shooter, is designed just for the Russian market, at least at first, and a beta is already live.

PC users started creating mods to enable those outside of Russia to play Halo Online

As you can imagine, given the popularity of the series all over the world and even on the PC platform, talented individuals started looking for ways to bypass the region restriction, so that they can download and play the game even if they're not in Russia.

One such method was quickly found, in the form of a modified game launcher, according to DSOG, which was then offered as a free download. Using this, quite a lot of people outside of Russia started exploring Halo Online on PC.

Microsoft is taking action against these mods

Unfortunately, this mod is no longer working as Microsoft has issued DMCA takedown requests against its authors. As a result, it's now no longer available, and those that want to play Halo Online but aren't in Russia have no valid way to achieve their goals.

You can bet that other modders might find workarounds to trick the systems employed by Microsoft and its Russian partner, Innova, so that they can play Halo Online from outside of Russia, but you can also bet that the two companies will act against them as well.

Halo developer 343 Industries mentioned that it has no plans, right now at least, to bring Halo Online to Europe or North America on PC, so expect to hear more after the game makes its proper debut in Russia later this year.