Looks like the February announcement of a new map pack that many have theorized may be true. Hopefully it means an early march release. More Halo: Reach DLC coming 'very soon' - Microsoft - News at GameSpot
The Legendary map pack came out in April, so its likely. I'd bet more like late march though. Unless they plan on cranking out a bunch of map packs, which I'm also fine with. More money, but more to keep the game alive.
My guess would be just more multiplayer maps around Spring. I just don't see Bungie doing anything more with Firefight or the Armory.
I'm figuring they want to be done with Reach within a year of it's launch. MS will also most likely want to milk 3-4 DLCs so I'm personally hoping for a March launch on this one and a Summer on Bungie's final map pack with a surprised halo CE remake coming Nov/11
Sate the masses with a forgeworld that contains every item from every level's palette. :v No more bitchin'! It'd be nice if they blew minds with interesting, unexpected content, though. Edit: And what Dav said below. Heck, even gaidens would be nice. Imagine, a tri-annual Gaiden DLC added to some games becoming a DLC norm.
Not that Reach's story was unfulfilling, but some backstory/additional story would be nice too. Kind of like how Mass Effect does it.
Personally, I kind of hate story-related DLC. The mass effect DLC was a rip-off (Shadow Broker should have been included in the game). While I guess it's more legitimate with Reach since it's months after the game but I don't know how fun it would be to play through a campaign level with one additional cutscene. It's a bit hard to interject more story into a FPS.
Reach is running on a modified version of the ODST engine which is a modified version of the Halo 3 engine... meaning the only DLC that they can release is more maps. Unless, however, said DLC was already on the disk and the only way to access it (barring modding) would be downloading the authorization from the marketplace. Although it wouldnt surprise me (since it will take at least three years for people to decode this damn game) I still HIGHLY doubt anything beyond more maps. If they did do armor downloads, then the download would have to include updates for every single map (including all of the campaign levels) and the theater, which would be nearing 10gb's of data for an update. Which is not doable at all. So don't waste your hope on stuff like that, I can promise you that we wont get anything other than a few bad maps
True. It was pretty pricey for a little narrative. For say a prequel-esque addition to Reach's story meager 400 points sounds reasonable, no?
You'd think people would be more mad that the extra squad member DLC were basically just unlock codes for the characters. Zaeed and Kasumi already existed on the disc. What the DLC did bring were the missions for them. How does that stop Bungie from having modified the engine to accept other forms of DLC? No sarcasm, just rhetorical. DLC usually does have a massive file size, so I doubt there's ever simply an unlock code. Back in Halo 2, universal model resources were stored in shared.map. Which means adding extra armor would basically revolve around patching that file. Besides that, Theater mode simply reads the 'script' of the recorded game. If the script tells the Theater to lookup a DLC model, it would just load that.
Ok, so hows this for an idea? A map that worked in multiplayer AND firefight. It wouldn't be too terribly difficult to design it to work for both, I mean, it wouldn't be too much different than making a map for Invasion and regular game modes. I'd also love to see a Headlong remake and Terminal remake.
I'm a little curious why they didn't try to do this out of the box. A few of the Firefight maps seem like they might be fun for multiplayer, maybe with just a little modification or the appropriate soft kill zones added. e.g. Waterfront, Overlook.
Idk, FF maps seem more one sided than even asymm objective maps. Not saying it couldn't work by any means, but I probably wouldn't want to play regular multiplayer on any of the current ones, definitely not Overlook, for example.
Idk, Overlook was quite fun in the beta. It could work for one sided objective games. I'd also really like to see Beachfront in multiplayer, just for lols. Looks like it'd be a good map for Territories.