UNSCleric.com

(Also posted on Xbox.com)

With all the hype, the public beta tests, and the eventual release of Halo 3 finally coming this year, 2007 truly will be remembered as the year of Halo, but there are many, many more incredible games coming later this year, which I will be doing an entry on soon.  This entry will be focusing on what I believe 2007 will bring us as far as Halo is concerned.

Sometime this spring or summer, Marvel will begin their “Halo: Ongoing” monthly comic, and there’s also another Halo novel in the works that will come out this year as well.

The question most people have right now is when will the new Halo 2 maps come out, and when will the Halo 3 public testing begin. 

A few days ago, videos and images leaked onto the Internet showing our troops in Iraq playing Halo 3 in its alpha stage.  Bungie has also commented on the testing recently as well.  Here’s a excerpt from the most recent Bungie.net update:

There’s some info floating around the interwebs about ways to enter the Halo 3 multiplayer beta… we’re not able to comment on that just yet but we do know that Microsoft will be formally revealing some new details next week. The initial sweepstakes registration on halo3.com was just the first stage of participation in the beta program.

We can comment, however, on our plans to roll-out a small pre-beta program to ramp up our scale just prior to the true public beta next Spring. Bungie will be tapping active members of our worldwide community to help us transition from the ongoing internal alpha multiplayer testing. Our hopes are to call into service experienced and active players of Halo 2 on Xbox Live, along with people who spread Bungie love (in safe, hygienic ways) and foster our community. Unfortunately we won’t be able to include everyone in this but we are hoping for quite a few (think thousands) spots. Once all the specifics are finalized we’ll provide more details on Bungie.net.

Later on in the update, they say the following:

Happy New Year from everyone at Bungie, and may 2007 bring you the most incredible stuff you ever hoped or dreamed for. Including, but not limited to Halo 3.

It’s not a coincidence that he said May 2007 right there.  This is possibly when the Halo 3 Beta will go mainstream and include tens of thousands of people, and probably will also mark the release month of the new Halo 2 maps that will be coming.  Those maps by the way, will only be playable if you have an Xbox 360.  This is to stop the modding/cheating that occurred on the original Xbox with Halo 2.

Is it possible that the pre-beta testing will begin in March, then the full beta in May, and then the actual game in November?  Yes.  With the PS3 tripping out of the gate late last year, and now with widespread reports of the PS3 sitting at stores for days at a time, I don’t think Microsoft is in any rush to get Halo 3 out in the spring or summer anymore.  If it wasn’t for Microsoft trying to stop people from buying a PS3, I don’t think we’d even be seeing a public beta occurring for Halo 3. 

There’s also the fact that one of Xbox 360’s main games this winter, Crackdown, which comes out February 20th, will have a Halo 3 beta invitation code sold with it.  I find it unlikely that the main beta wouldn’t start sometime soon after that.  I believe we will see the pre-beta testing phase begin in late-February, into March, and then the main beta testing will begin by the end of March.  The release of the game is still anybody’s guess though, and my guess is still July.  The fact that Bungie has been working on this game since late 2004, and also had their team nearly tripled right after Halo 2’s release makes me think that.  With Halo and Halo 2, they didn’t begin working on the actual game that was released until less than a year before the game came out, this was due to them scrapping previous builds of the game.  There was a lot of wasted time and poor planning it seems when it came to actually developing the physical game.

With Halo 3 however, they have the development process down to a science.  They’ve been hitting all their goals and timelines, and have done consistent development on the game for over two years now.   The title of Marvel Comics’ new (”Ongoing”) series on Halo also makes it sound like people will have experienced Halo 3 by the end of the summer.

With Bungie having a  larger team, better development tools, more experience, and a new office to work in, I don’t think we’re going to have to wait until November 2007 to “Finish The Fight”.

When do you think Halo 3 will come out?  When do you think the beta testing will start?

Also, I want to announce that the address, NextGenInfowar.com will also bring you to this site from now on.  Might be a little easier to remember or tell people about.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Playstation 3 News, Site News, Xbox 360 News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.