HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3! HALO3!
Bungie Shocks World with Surprise Game Announcement
Bungie announces Halo 3, the third and final game in the Halo Trilogy. Halo 3 will be released for Microsoft's Xbox 360 in 2007.
Release Date : 2007
Platform : Xbox 360
Players : TBA
Online Enabled : Yes (Xbox Live)
Type : First Person Shooter
Publisher : Microsoft Game Studios
Halo 3 is the third game in the Halo Trilogy and will provide the thrilling conclusion to the events begun in Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo 3 was first revealed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on May 6th, 2006. Halo 3 will be available for Xbox 360 in 2007.
Halo 3 will pick up where Halo 2 left off. The Master Chief is returning to Earth to finish the fight. The Covenant occupation of Earth has uncovered a massive and ancient object beneath the African sands - an object who's secrets have yet to be revealed. Earth's forces are battered and beaten.
The Master Chief's AI companion Cortana is still trapped in the clutches of the Gravemind - a horrifying Flood intelligence, and a civil war is raging in the heart of the Covenant. This is how the world ends...
The game was revealed to the world at the Microsoft press conference at Grauman's Chinese Theater, in Hollywood, CA. By the time you read this, the announcement trailer should be available for download on bungie.net and directly to your Xbox 360, in full HD glory from Xbox Live Marketplace. Read no further if you want to avoid spoilers.
Nobody saw it coming. Halo 3! Who knew? For the last year or two, people have speculated about what our next project was and surprisingly, in all that time, not a single person guessed that it would be Halo 3. Not one.
We declare it the best kept secret ever.
Sillhouette through the wreckage
Seriously though, it's been a chore biting our tongues on this one. Call it a combination of studio secrecy, corporate secrecy, Bill Gates already announcing it four times and, you know, whatever.
We won't ruin the content of our short presentation by describing it frame by frame, but we will note that everything you're seeing here is being rendered in real-time on the Xbox 360, using the current version of our Halo 3 game engine. The HDR lighting, self-shadowing, GPU-run particle system and many other effects should make it intact (and more) to our final game.
"The trailer was built to have minimum impact on the development process"
We demonstrated the real-time nature of the demo after the press conference (thanks to our friends at Pioneer with awesome audio-video assistance) to a small group of reporters, so we'll wait and see what their judgment on the presentation was, but you should feel free to make your own.
The trailer was built to have minimum impact on the development process, and while it required long hours and hard work from many, many Bungie staffers, it utilizes real-game assets, fiction and locations from parts of the "real" game.
The Chief is back.
In fact, it's the stuff it doesn't contain that gives it a strange kind of context. You can see how detailed the Chief is, but that detail applies to our other, unseen, unrevealed characters, vehicles, environment and so on. There's no AI visible in the demo, no multiplayer, and the entire thing has been left deliberately subdued both to give scale to the artifact and because this is our announcement. The real stuff will come later.
Fans of Halo fiction will be able to guess at a vast array of possibilities, even from this short piece, and discuss them in our newly launched Halo 3 Forum. For those new to the series, we'll make every effort to bring you up to speed on the story in forthcoming Bungie.net updates. We'll also be resurrecting the true purpose of the Update-proper - a weekly diary on the progress of the game that has been stymied recently, by the absence of (reveal-able) information.
Of course the trailer itself is a teaser - with no multiplayer, a single Earth-based locale, none of our sweet new AI or gameplay technologies. No physics to speak of, no new features other than a sneak peek at the graphics and audio engines?but the other stuff is there, and we'll reveal more as time goes on.
"Cortana and the Chief being a galaxy apart is a situation we haven't seen before"
CJ Cowan, Bungie's director of cinematics discussed one of the most startling moments in the piece, the return of Cortana, "Given the variety of character and story arcs at the end of Halo 2, we wanted to boil down our announcement to a few key threads. Cortana and the Chief being a galaxy apart is a situation we haven't seen before, and is something that is a powerful component to Halo 3. We are using her transmissions in the demo to give the viewer a few subtle clues to her situation and state of mind, without revealing any specifics we want to save for the game itself."
Cortana
The Cortana reveal is the first evidence that this trailer might be for Halo 3, but the game's main protagonist is the item that seals that deal. CJ explains, "It is the Chief, back on a devastated and Covenant controlled Earth, standing over the excavation of a structure buried in the crust of our own planet that is the meat of our demo...
For the full article, as well as pictures and the E3 announcment trailer go Here.