Halo Wars Strategic Options

In case you haven’t already noticed.. Halo Wars strategic options DLC has been released! The community is buzzing at the HaloWars.com community and you can check out all the action in the official thread. Be on the lookout for comments from Robot developers and rest assured they are watching, gathering feedback.

My thoughts? The DLC is fun and is entertaining, its very enjoyable to play for fans of the game and introduces some new play styles which really make you think about new tactics and strategies in order to win.

Unfortunately though there is no multiplayer online except for party games for a majority of the new modes. Alot of players have expressed some sadness about this so I wanted to highlight comments made by Dave Pottinger about the issue:

“None of the DLC was on the disc when it shipped.  The game modes are a small download because they are rules.  There is some new content, but it’s obviously a different type of content compared to a map.  Also, the recent patch added a bunch of missing support/engine groundwork for both DLCs.

We are limited in the number of matchmaking buckets we can use due to Live.  We left a bunch of buckets available for the DLC, but perhaps we made too many team oriented buckets.  We’ll evaluate changing/modifying that as we get feedback.  FWIW, since the DLC modes are generally more team-based than the default game, we skewed the new hoppers to be team-focused as well.” – Dave Pottinger.

Hopefully Microsoft might be able to extend the number of multi player buckets available for their first party game. If not it is possible based on feedback that Robot will be able to mix and match modes as per gamer feedback.

So.. if you want to make your voice heard head over to the thread!