Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack

On Canada Day, I was fortunate enough to win a community contest on the Xbox Canadian General forums for Halo 3's Mythic Map Pack.

While I haven't gotten to play them too much, I have had a brief chance to sample each Mythic Map and thus far they're both well designed and fun. Assembly's my favourite, with Sandbox being my least, but then again I was never huge on Forge.

Now, I haven't played Halo 3's Matchmaking in several months, so I was quite surprised to learn that many of the Playlists now require all the DLC, or at least the premium DLC. In English, that means to play a Playlist that shipped with the retail game, you'll need to go and purchase at least 1400 Microsoft Points ($20.30) of content, 2 x Map Packs, a total of 6 Multiplayer Maps.

That's horrible! So basically, if you want to enjoy Halo 3 out-of-the-box over Xbox LIVE, you now _must_ purchase the Halo 3 Legendary Map Pack and the Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack. I still can't believe it, and that's a disgusting cash-in that's turned me right off of Halo 3's Multiplayer. Extra maps should only be requried if they're _free_ to all, otherwise "premium" Playlists should be kept separate.

What's even worse is that Playlist's are maintained and implemented by Bungie, not Microsoft Game Studios, so this is a nice example of a developer providing the milkage.

Shame on you, Bungie Studios. I've just lost a lot of respect for you.