The Bungie team is reporting that yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Halo. They also provided some scoop about an upcoming commercial for Halo 3 that will be released during Monday Night Football on December 4th.
Now to the business at hand – There's some juicy Halo information to absorb and process. First up is the announcement of an exclusive worldwide Halo 3 TV commercial set to air during Monday Night Football on December 4th. Naturally we don’t want to spoil the fun but we did want to clear the air on a few points up front to set your expectations appropriately. As the press release mentions, this ad will feature CG scenes that are being built by a 3rd party agency (known as Digital Domain). Now you may be thinking to yourself - "CG!? But Bungie doesn’t do CG!" - and you would be correct... until now.
For the purposes of this holiday commercial and knowing the tight timeline with which it had to come together we decided a long time ago that utilizing real, final, actual gameplay just wasn't the right thing to do. As you know, we're very protective of our baby and we will only show it when we feel it's ready to be shown (and even then it's sometimes pried from our protective fingers). We all agreed that a cooler thing to do would be to move as far away from gameplay-style footage as possible, and make something more movie-like. Let our fans see what the Halo universe looks like in a photo-realistic fashion.
We didn't want folks to think we were trying to pull the wool over their eyes, when we had such a great opportunity to do something cool and worthwhile.
Now don't get me wrong - just because this ad isn't gameplay doesn't mean it's not really cool. In fact, we provided the folks at Digital Domain with all of our new in-game models and assets. They then polished them up to movie CGI standards, animated them and rendered them to a degree of stunning beauty. There will be a lot to like in this ad and we're happy with how it's turning out. Just because you're seeing a kind of "real-life" representation of Halo 3 doesn't mean you aren't seeing real gameplay elements from Halo 3.
Of course you'll also hear Halo 3 as well, with new music composed by our own Marty O’Donnell. We'll leave it at that for now. After the commercial airs on television, it will be available on Xbox Live Marketplace in full 720p glory for you to dissect and discuss.
They also said a public beta of the game will be available before the game is released.
Perhaps the biggest bomb that was dropped today, the MOAB of press announcements, was the indication of a public beta for Halo 3 coming next Spring. What exactly does this mean? Well, again we can't really get into the details quite yet (notice a theme here?) but we can confirm that our fans will have an opportunity to play Halo 3 multiplayer over Xbox Live BEFORE the final game is available. You'll be playing a little multiplayer and simultaneously providing us with some valuable data to help our development team. We're still working out the details on timing and scope and there will be a lot more info coming in the weeks ahead. We can confirm that you will absolutely be required to have an Xbox 360. Probably not a huge surprise.
Bungie has a lot to live up to after the success with Halo 2 which one countless video game awards. There will be high expectations from Halo fans. Fortunately, the Bungie staff sounds very dedicated to the task and determined to turn out another excellent product with Halo 3.
The Bungie team is 
