The opinion relfected herein in no way reflects the opinions of 2old2play.com -- ed. Wait, I am the ed. Either way, this is my rant, not 2o2p's. Die, MS, die.
It was one thing to coerce us into buying Crackdown for a shot at the Halo 3 beta.
At that point in time, there was no Halo game built for the Xbox 360 and Halo 2 was humming along at a fever pitch with no competition whatsoever. It was a different world back then. Sure, it was not really any less lame to have to buy Crackdown to guarantee your spot in the beta, but … at least there were other ways in.
I got in twice, once for buying Crackdown, once for getting my name pulled outta the hat in the Bungie “Friends and Family Early Beta Entry” thing. The point here is that the company had some plausible deniability. They could stand back and say, “Hey, you didn’t have to buy your way into the beta. You didn’t have to buy Crackass to get in.”
But the precedent was set for the situation we’re in now with the Mythic Map Pack.
If I want to play Assembly, Orbital or Sandbox, I have to go out and buy not just Halo Wars, but Halo Wars LE, which is … wait for it … $80.
As of this moment, there has been no official release date for the map pack as DLC, which means Microsoft is sitting around watching the sales numbers of the Halo Wars LE before they go ahead and give those of us who didn’t fall for their bullshit deal a chance to play the maps.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not picking on my fellow Halo junkies for succumbing to the bullshit. I did the devil’s deal for Crackdown, after all. But this is goddamn ridiculous.
The lack of a date for the DLC is the ultimate slap in the face to Halo fans. We’re the people who pushed the game to 1,000,000,000 games played. We’re the ones who buy the stupid action figures and the goddamn books. We’re at fault, really, for MS figuring they can fuck us in the ass like this.
The lack of a date, and the fact that signs point to it being six fucking weeks before we’ll get the chance to pay a reasonable price for our maps, is them sitting back smugly going, “We don’t give a fuck about the fans, we only care about the money,” which, from an intellectual standpoint, I already know. But as a Bungie fan, I’ve come to expect better. We’re not being treated like Bungie fans.
See, I don’t like RTS games. It makes no difference to me that the game is set in the Halo universe. It’s not an FPS. Furthermore, it’s not Halo. One of the things I’ve come to terms with is that I’m really just a Halo player. In anything other than Halo, I’m a casual gamer. Yeah, sure I still have the unreasonable competitive streak, but I don’t get into the other games. I can play them, then drop them and never go back. I buy other games, but I don’t finish them, and eventually, I sell them back (or as of late, mail them back to Gamefly, again, unfinished).
There is no reason for me to buy Halo Wars… other than to get the code for the map pack. I would be paying $80 for three maps. No offense to Bungie, but never have they made a map worth $26.
Insult to injury is that this appears to be far and away the best of the Halo 3 map packs (if reports are to be believed from my comrades in arms). In my case, the only map of the expansion packs I play with any regularity is Foundry, and then not in its default configuration
Th3Midnighter bought the LE, then turned right back around and sold it for $60, so he’s only out $20 more than the maps will actually cost when they hit the marketplace. Again, as a Halo junkie, that’s not an unappealing proposition.
But it’s the principle of the thing. If I buy the goddamn $80 game for three maps, it’s telling Microsoft I’m stupid enough for them to pull those kind of shenanigans on me on a regular basis.
I’m not going to do it, and this is the only game I play. There are others like me, and the bitch of it all is that we just get to sit around and stew in our map-downloading impotence, because the cruel truth is that Microsoft doesn’t give a shit about us, and by extension, neither does Bungie. I find it very difficult to believe Bungie has no power whatsoever to affect the release timetable of these maps. If they wanted the gap cut down to say, a week, they could’ve done that.
That’s obviously not going to happen.
So, fuck you Microsoft and Bungie. You can't have my extra money.
