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Foundry should be awesome!

The third picture looks amazing!

Looks like some really varied and unique locations, Bungie has been working hard :P

800 MS points for 3 maps it is just too much. Even if they look really cool, no way I will spend such amount of money. They don't worth it.

Yup. 3 maps for 800 points is a joke. Shame on Bungie & MS.

way too expensive, seeing as so many people will want this they should be 400 points, sad thing is, I will still end up getting it anyway.

They charged $5 for 2 maps before, so this should really be ~600 points or less.

WHAT A JOKE. 800 FREAKING POINTS for only Three Maps. Well they can go F*** themselves off

One of the reasons I don't play shooters on my Xbox 360, because you just know they will charge you extra for stuff like this.. On the PC I've never paid for just a few extra MP maps, and I never will..

I don't blame MS for doing it on their console though, because obviously plenty of Xbox 360 users are willing to pay up.. And the longer this will go on, the more normal and more accepted it will get, the more worse it will get (can it get any worse? There's hardly any free content on XBL already accept trailers and demo's)..

The only hope is Sony not going the same way and offering more for free, hopefully forcing MS to do the same eventually.. Like I said, I don't mind MS charging the hell out of everything on the marketplace, but then at least make online gaming free.. I have the feeling now of getting charged double, maybe even triple.. You buy a Xbox 360, buy a game, pay for online MP (just peer to peer), and then they also charge you for any DLC, no matter how tiny..

I'll just stick to PC for shooters etc if the game is available on that platform.. I don't care the hardware costs me more, at least it doesn't give me the bad feeling of being nickle&dimed to death..

^^

This needs to be said like a million times over. They can keep them. Like Halo hasn't made them enough money--like they haven't milked Halo 3 enough already.

To be clear, these maps will be free in Spring 2008

I don't find this in anyway defendable however. At the very least they should have found some sponsored content or 2 free maps, 2 paid like last time. Some sort of compromise. To come right out the bat when the game only had 11 maps and arguably not all of those "new" is disgraceful.

I've been fairly open minded about MS approach to DLC thus far but I'm feeling severely let down at 800pts for three.

I'm going to add comments to Major Nelson's blog as well as the Gamerscore one and Bungie / MS forums to voice my dissatisfaction and I would encourage everyone to do the same in a polite but firm manner at the very least. The ultimate protest is to not purchase however but that's for everyone to make their own minds up on. I'm genuinely undecided.

Hey, if there's obviously plenty of people wanting to be milked, you cannot blame MS for milking them.. They simply know enough people will buy it anyway because they 'have to'.. To many Xbox gamers are to addicted to Halo3, and they will buy this pack if they want it or not because all their friends will aswell.. It's the same with WoW on the PC..

Money is all that counts, not what we want.. Big companies like MS don't care about we want, they only care about what sells.. We people are weak, we need to consume whatever the cost (especially in the west), and big companies like MS (ab)use that need to make money, bigtime.. I try to resist as much as possible (I don't buy into hypes etc), but I'm also weak, me buying a Xbox 360 and paying for XBL Gold is prove of that.. But paying for just a few extra MP maps that any kid with some good mapping skills can create in a week is where I draw the line.. Same as with gamerpics and theme's etc, it's rediculous we have to pay for that BS..

Standard MS excuse. Make it free when people hardly care anymore and they've already sold as many copies as they're likely to sell. The absolute worst part is what this does to the global community, for any given game--it splits it in two, severing one part (the reasonable consumer) from other. You're basically given an option, pay up, or don't play with your friends.

Screw that. It's already hard to believe the game has 11 maps when there seem to be so few in any given playlist. I'll just play something else. They ruined Gears of War for me with this same bullshit tactic.

Very disappointing.

Err, just containers in a room? that MUST be a good map... >.<

Bungie screwed it up for me and a lot of hardcore Halo fans. The mapdesign on most maps is horrible and the combat's pretty unbalanced (mostly due to bad mapdesign, tho). No way I'm gonna spend more money on this as the maps we already have are disappointing to say the least...

And another rant: The game is how old? not even 2 months and there are already new maps out? It couldn't get more obvious really. I was browsing through the Bungie forum and there are a lot of coplains about the game and the maps in particulat. Far too few with bad map design. The standard answer you get from fanboys is: "Wait 2-3 months and we'll get new maps, then Halo will be cool again." Well and if that doesn't fix the problem the next ones will do. Sadly it seems like that BS works over and over again...

so this is what bungie is up to,

anyway this, we already pay for these things the least we can do is get them free

It's going to take a bit more than 3 maps to bring me back to Halo 3.

Yup, because that (marketingwise smart) policy means they screw the real Halo fans, and then give the maps for free to the people who don't care enough to buy them.. They know very well the real fans will have to buy them, and they don't care.. All they care about is making as much money as possible, and this marketingstrategy is probably what came out of all their calculations how to do that..

That's why I respect PC developers like Epic, ID, Relic, and Valve, among others, for give stuff to the fans for free.. They make enough money making and selling very good games, they can produce extra content without losing money on it.. That's also how you build real communities of fans, you reward the people who bought and like your game with extra content, and don't make them pay extra for it..

EA tried to change this with BF2/2142 by releasing "Booster" packs that no one played anyway. They're going to try again though.. but thankfully it's a far tougher sale in that market.

It's scary how supportive everyone on Major Nelson's blog is. This trend will only get worse.

800 points for shootie snipers? Ohhh sooo sold! :| Ahem. I don't know how many Halo uber-fans have complained to me about how horrible Halo 3 MP is compared to Halo 2, and charging and arm and a leg for some more content is a joke considering how little it is and how much MS/BUNGIE have made from consumers. Hey, with 3 more maps, they only need 4 more to catch the MP GOTY! ;)

I know.. And let's hope it will continue to fail on the PC, because if they manage to do it succesfully it may be the beginning of the end of free content on the PC.. They might even start to not release editors etc anymore to get rid of the free community competition aswell..

For the same reason I hope Windows Live completly flops.. MS can take their premium Gold BS and keep it on the Xbox..

Like I said, it's a real threat to the free and open PC-gaming environment what's going on on the consoles right now and especially on the Xbox 360.. Because the more gamers get used to getting charged on the consoles, the more likely it is gamers will start to accept it on the PC aswell.. Companies like EA and MS would love to see it happen, but I really hope it never happens..

The gameplay itself is actually quite a bit better than Halo 2 imo. The netcode on the other hand, is crap, as is the map rotation, and variety in match making. But the game *is* great despite their best effort to crap all over the fanbase.I don't think we have to worry much about MS, ironically. They can't even get PC gamers to buy Vista, and Live Anywhere is dead on arrival. I'd be more concerned with EA personally.. but even then, if people keep rejecting this nonsense, they'll eventually give up (I think).No way. Halo 3's net code is terrible. Thanks to saved films, I have plenty of demos saved where I literally die with no players in my line of sight, anywhere, just to document how bad the lag gets. It's not just the frequency of the lag that sucks either (which is pretty damn bad) but how the game copes with it (which is terrible).

Now look at something like BF or COD, which has support for more players and handles them much better. I'm not sure how anyone could claim that Halo 3 has good net code.

Without getting into it too much. The lag in Halo 3 is much better than Halo 2. Certainly from my perspective BTB is much more playable and I NEVER host any games.

That's not to say it isn't there but the netcode is better and I've barely seen any complaints about it.

Agreed. They can fuck off on tjhis one.

They didnt put much effort into the game, and they barely had any REAL maps.
Halo killed itself.

A bit off topic, but I think not having any dedicated servers (either officially or allowing people to use a extra Xbox 360 to run a dedicated server) on a 'paid' online service is rediculous aswell anno 2007.. I just cannot take consoleshooters seriously because of that.. Imagine having to play on listenservers only on the PC, what a joke (read: nightmare) that would be..

Stuff like that all adds up to me even less likely to accept paying for a few extra MP maps (if I did care to play shooters on a console like the Xbox 360)..

Halo 3 is made for the casual gamer. You see it everywhere:

The starting weapon is a point and shooter, worse than anything that they were coming up with yet. If it wasn't the starting weapon it woulnd't be that bad.

The whole purpose of the mapdesign is to get very close quaters combat: Many corners/turns and small passages. Shielddoors is the WORST thing I've ever seen in any game, it's gamebraking as people use them to constandly camp. Also every map has like 4-6 people with closequater weapons running around. One hit and beatdwon, how fun.

The radar isn't as practical as in Halo 2 where you would know exactly where your enemy is. The radar has less functions even though the game evolved (and the MC armor is the same). Now on vertical maps it's useless.

The extremly bad net-code is the top of the pineacle. In short it works like this: To compensate for the lag they instroduced a new hit detection. So if you melee someone who would die from the hit and he melees you back a splitsecond later and he has a tiny bit more shields (you were involved in a fight before that maybe) he'll kill you, even on splitscreen and on LANs. Something similar seems to happen when you're hitting someone with a weapon: Sniperheadshot and the enemy dies a splitsecond later. This only happend on very lagy Halo 2 games for me, and it disrupts the flow of the game. In an AR vs AR fight it's most of the time luck and who hit's who first.

The whole game is made for the casual gamer so MS/Bungie can milk more money out of Halo than they already would have if they made a proper game. The losers are the MP fans really, who played Halo 2 even though they had their Xbox 360 with a few games (I did). Some of them even go back to Halo 2 although we all know it's far from perfect. The amount of BS happening during a single MP match keeps my hand away from this game, and for over a month with success...

Wow, I'm impressed with how different these appear to look. But I just couldn't get past the lack of custom games search (Xbox Public or whatever they were going to call it) and the playlist matchmaking concept. Even Perfect Dark let's you pick what gametype/map you want to play....