After what seems like forever after coming out, Bungie finally admits the sting of regret after excluding a matchmaking service for it's Firefight mode in Halo 3: ODST because there wasn't enough time to put it in (snicker, snicker). Bungie Community honcho, Brian Jarrard had this to say on the matter:

I regret not being able to go back and make Firefight in ODST work and have match-making. I think we would have loved to have done that. We've heard it from the fans, we've heard it from the press. It's definitely something we'd have loved to be able to do but we didn't have the scope on the project. We didn't have the time.

We accomplished a tremendous amount, but that's probably the reason ODST isn't being played as much right now as we'd like. It has had a shorter lifecycle than any of the Halo titles before. But Reach is our big chance to make up for some of those things.

I'm sure a lot of gamers were incredibly disappointed, as I was, that ODST had no matchmaking for a game mode that for sure should have had a matchmaking utility. I know it prevented me from buying the game at all. It just didn't make sense to me that a "horde mode" like game type could go without matchmaking. You're telling me that other people who bought the game would totally be opposed to playing it with strangers? Isn't that the basis of all Halo multiplayer?

Bungie seems pretty adamant that ODST's success fell pretty short of the mark and want to make it up to the players when Halo: Reach comes out. Which I will admit, looks very much like a return to form in terms of storytelling and gameplay, two things I actually liked Halo 1 in the first place for. Though, no one can really know until Reach actually comes out and we get our hands on it.

Halo: Reach allows you to see the fall sometime in... Fall 2010.

Source: OXM