Wednesday 12 April 2006
The eagerly anticipated Halo 3 will be a free-form prequel boasting persistent worlds, four-player co-op and non-linear evolving gameplay, and will be named Forerunner.
The Forerunner were techno-savvy aliens who created the colossal Halo artefacts and then disappeared. These details appeared after US gaming magazine Game Informer enjoyed an exclusive audience with Bungie, where it was also claimed that the new game will not continue the Halo story from where Halo 2 left off.
Bungie published a reply soon after the magazine hit the shelves last month, stating that the wild news piece was nothing more than a journalist's April Fool's Day joke.
But the latest issue of Game Informer again claims that it reported the truth about Forerunner, and that it was never intended as a joke. Then, for good measure, the mag threw out another info-bomb by revealing that a massively multiplayer Halo game is also in development.
Still, Bungie is notorious for pulling the wool over the eyes of the media: there have been rumours of a pirate game seeping from the developer's homepage for years - and that's just because it loves pirates.
It's almost certain that a new Halo game is in the works - Bill Gates would look pretty stupid if there wasn't - but the odds are that we won't hear anything until the E3 games show in May. Until then, everything else is just smoke and mirrors. Perhaps even this story...
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