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.
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.
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.