After having played the Firefight mode in Halo 3: ODST, I’m very disappointed that they weren’t able to include matchmaking. I’m disappointed because Firefight mode is tons of fun, and the lack of any matchmaking or lobby system means that I won’t get to play nearly as much of it as I would like.
It’s bizarre to me the way people are rationalizing this decision. Go to any XBox, Halo, or Bungie forum and you’ll find people complaining. You’ll also find a boatload of people ready with one of these standard retorts: “we knew about this a long time ago and don’t care”, or “you must suck if you don’t have any friends to play with”. That last one tends to get followed up with either “you would only want to play Firefight with friends anyway”, or “you can look for friends on this forum and play Firefight with them”. The contradiction inherent in these two statements should be obvious.
Matchmaking is a huge boon to any game, because it allows you to focus on a singular goal, which in this case is playing a round of 4-player Firefight. It allows you to accomplish that goal by matching you up with the pool of players around the world that have the same goal, long after all of your own friends have moved on to other games, and all those people you added from the forums (who you never really played with anyway) have stopped playing. It allows you to take yourself and your cousin from out-of-town at 2:30 in the morning and hop into a 4-player game of Firefight, even though none of your friends are awake. Is there anyone out there that really thinks this isn’t desirable? Or, more to the point, expected — especially in a console shooter released in 2009?
I know Bungie told us all about this long ago. And I know (thanks everybody!) that you can play Firefight mode with friends. But the lack of matchmaking stops this game from being a “pull off the shelf twice a month for the next two years” purchase, and turns it into a “hold onto until Left 4 Dead 2″ rental.
Bummer.