The “Prepare To Drop” trailer is filled with hidden clues about the upcoming Expansion Pack for Halo 3. We’ve put together an analysis of important frames so you don’t have too.

Right from the start, we see a covenant cruiser flying somewhere in New Mombosa. It’s assumed that this is just moments before Regret makes his jump in New Mombasa in Halo 2. Several seconds later, we see a huge explosion which may be caused by the slipspace rift.

Confirmation that this is in fact New Mombasa, and it has been evacuated.

We see a series of drop pods closing in on New Mombasa, coming in two different directions. The Super Intendent AI targets the ones dropping to the right, and displays a message “AUTH.NEGATIVE”.

In the same few frames as above, the message, ‘ACTIVATING SUBROUTINE “VERGIL”‘ and “WARNING! DATA LEAK ON LEVEL 9!” are displayed. These messages show up several times in short intervals throughout the teaser.

After the huge slipspace rift, everything goes dark, and a sequence of messages display very rapidly on the screen. “Maddie, Where are you?” is one of the messages.

“Danger.Flood Zone” is another one of the messages.

Following these messages, we find a possible release date for Halo: Prepare to Drop. Hidden in some meaningless text is a date that reads 01/06/09.

A lone drop pod emerges at 53 seconds. There is no indication why emphasis has been put on it, but it could perhaps contain our protagonist(s). Could it be the chief? We doubt it since it wouldn’t seem to make sense with the timeline.

Rather, we like to believe that the first series of drop pods were all wiped out by the slipspace rift. In response, a team is deployed, but only one (perhaps the only one that remains?)

This fits in nicely with the recent posts by the Super Super Intendent on Bungie.net:

[COMM.DUTY.OFFICER]: “Listen. We have a report of core data corruption.” Corrupted by the blast?

[COMM.DUTY.OFFICER]: “We’re sending a team, alright?” Officer is sending team to the corrupted SI?

[SMN.ACTUAL]: “Empty archer pods six through twelve!”…
[SMN.ACTUAL]: “It may have passed us, Lieutenant, but it’s still in range.”…
[EXPLOSION (2.3482s)]
[STATIC (3.8761s)] Pods are deployed — the ship is still in range (on Earth) — then a long explosion and static. Coincidentally, the Explosion and static is nearly precisely the same amount of time the explosion and static for the slipspace rift lasts in the trailer.

[SMN.ACTUAL]: “Alright, Captain. You’ve got your squad.” After the explosion, an additional squad is confirmed.

Prepare to Drop seems to be the name of the expansion.

Did we miss anything?

Bungie will be announcing a new game with a video teaser on Thursday, September 25th through the Xbox Live Marketplace and Bungie.net.

Members of the Bungie.net forums A member of the Bungie.net Forums found a notification that was not intended to be revealed until the anniversary of Halo 3. The notification (which will seemingly pop-up when you boot up Halo 3 sometime on Thursday), simply states that the teaser for the next Bungie game is available on the XBL Marketplace and Bungie.net.

The messages were quickly taken down, and a countdown timer has been reinitiated on Bungie.net. This same countdown appeared during E3, but was later canceled by Microsoft. The timer currently counts down to 7:07 a.m. PST.

30 new achievements were added to Halo 3 today on Xbox.com including the 6 new Halo 3 skulls we mentioned in a recent post.

Among the achievements listed on Xbox.com are the Assembly Skull, Citadel Skull, Heretic Skull, Longshore Skull, Orbital Skull, and the Sandbox Skull. Each unlocked Skull achievement will tack on an extra 25 points to Gamer Score, and an extra achievement for finding all of the skulls will add another 25 points for a grand total of 175GS.

It’s still a mystery as to how these skulls will be implemented, but it would seem as if they might be integrated into a new series of maps dubbed “Mythic” based on achievement descriptions on Xbox.com. Bungie has remained silent in regards to these additional achievments so far.

Despite all this, the talk in the Halo Community has largely centered around two recent featured postings on Bungie.net, featuring the Super Intendent that we saw back during E3. In the most recent posting from tonight, folks were left baffled by a vague and interesting dialogue.

Here’s to hoping we find out more about all of this Tomorrow when TU2 goes live!

According to rumors started at PAX, the build shown to folks who attended contained several achievements that were not a part of the original Halo 3 release.

30 New Achievements to be exact.

Among the newly added achievements are Six New Skulls. That’s right. Six New Halo 3 Skulls. Whether or not they’ll be like traditional skulls is still up in the air (especially considering that these new skulls seem to be associated with multiplayer maps rather than single player maps) — and there are no details on whether or not they’ll be used in campaign mode to add special effects to ordinary gameplay.

Whatever the case may be, we’ve updated our Halo 3 Skulls page with the new skulls, and will be on the search for them as soon as they are made available. During our search for the IWHBYD Skull, we ended up with over 600 posts in a massive hunt for the location of the best-hidden item we’ve ever seen.

Will you be there when we search for these skulls?

1. Heretic Skull
2. Citadel Skull
3. Assembly Skull
4. Sandbox Skull
5. Orbital Skull
6. Longshore Skull

Bungie’s updated their gallery with some brand new screenshots of Cold Storage, the remake of the classic Halo map, “Chill out”.  High Resolution versions of the screens can be found in the Bungie Halo 3 gallery.

I think it’s safe to say that the Halo community is pretty excited about the release of this map.  While we don’t have any new details about a release date, Bungie states that we’ll learn more about this map next week!

Arguably Halo: CE’s most popular map, Chill Out was put on display last night by Bungie at the MLG San Diego event, the second stop on the 2008 MLG Pro Circuit. The new map – dubbed ‘Cold Storage’ – was displayed by Luke Smith and Shishka in an exhibition match against two MLG stars. The boys from Bungie made no mention of the intended release date.

MLG has kindly hosted some images from the event. Follow this link for the gallery.

We’ll be keeping you updated on the new maps as they are announced, and we might even help a few lucky readers pay for the pack.

This is just a friendly reminder that the Halo 3 Legendary Map Pack is due for release, tomorrow, April 15th. If you get a chance, you’ll probably want to start downloading the new map pack as soon as it’s released, as it will take some time to actually download all of the files.

For those of you looking for a recap of the Legendary Map Pack, here are the 3 maps that will be released tomorrow:

• Avalanche – A brand new rendition of Sidewinder. Not exactly a remake.
• Blackout – A remake of Lockout!
• Ghost Town – A brand new map, which some say slightly resembles Turf from Halo 2.

Tomorrow’s going to be an awesome day!

EDIT: *YAWN* Ok, the maps are live for all you night owls who stayed up.

Bungie has released a trailer for their upcoming Legendary Map Pack for Halo 3, and this time, no one’s pulling an April Fools on anyone else (sheesh… I am April Fooled out). You can grab an HD copy directly from them if you’d like, or from the Xbox Live Marketplace eventually. We’re really excited about the launch of the three new Maps, Blackout, Avalanche, and Ghost Town.

Remember, you can grab em on live starting April 15th! Mark your calendars!

The flash video appears to be down, so I recommend using this link to the Bungie.net story and downloading the videos from there.

I am pleased to announce a Grifball tournament that we are planning to start sometime in early march. The tournament will consist of 6 round robin games (5 within conference and 1 outside of your conference), and an 8 team medal round. The finals will be a 3 game playoff, with both the winning and losing team receiving prizes.

Here is the forum where sign-ups and all other dealings with the tournament will take place.

And here is the rules thread in that forum. It is taken largely from Rooster Teeth’s league rules, but there are some key changes (prizes, etc).

We’re hoping for 20 total teams in the league, split into two conferences (named Hammer and Sword), so get your team in early. Preference will be given for active teams on the Rooster Teeth Grifball forums and active members of the Halo3Planet.com forums.

Prizes are as follows:

1. The first place team’s roster during the final match-ups will receive a Microsoft Points card (We’re estimating 500 MS Points each).
2. The team finishing second overall will receive 500 MS Points each for their final roster only.
3. Both finalist teams will receive the rank of “Grifballer” on the Halo3Planet forums, regardless of whether they actually played in the final games.
4. A tournament MVP will be chosen from the two finalist teams, and they will be awarded a year’s subscription to OXM (Official XBox Magazine).
5. A prize of a Bungie Pro year subscription will be awarded to the Team Captain who schedules and plays all of his/her games before any other team has completed their schedule as an incentive for teams to schedule games early and on time. If the tournament round robin has been completed early, the playoffs will start early.
6. We’re trying to organize some nifty shirts with our Grifball Spring Smash ‘08 logo, and will hopefully be giving out a few of those to deserving players as well.
7. Prizes may change for better or worse.  We’re having trouble gifting MS Points now that Microsoft canceled that service.

There are three brand new maps in their “Content Complete” stage as of now, meaning that they are all technically finished, and just have some testing to go through before they are ready for release.  We recommend reading through the udpate yourself, but here’s a quick run down.

Note:  These are the codenames for each map.  Final Map Names have been decided, but have not been announced according to Frankie.

Cottonball

• Very Large Map.  Unless you’re playing a Big Team Snipers game, it would be a joke to play without vehicles.
• Set on a Halo Environment.
• Symmetrical (for the most part).
• Best played on Assault and CTF Game types.

Purple Reign

• Somewhere between Small and Medium sized.
• Going out on a limb here, but to me this sounds similar to a remake of “Prisoner”.  Obviously from the text, not an exact remake, but holds very similar concepts.
• “Verticality” is an important aspect of this map.  There are lots of ways up, and bridges connecting gaps between opposite sides.
• “Central Hub” which will certainly be fought over (Remind anyone of rockets from “Prisoner”?  Again, totally making assumptions here, and I’m not even good at predicting these sorts of things.)
• One way glass to see incoming enemies.

OK Corral

• Medium to Large.
• From the description, sounds like a worn down city landscape of sorts.
• Confined spaces make vehicles only worth using in emergencies.
• High and Low Routes on the map make it tough to know where you’re enemies are coming from.

We’re already foaming at the mouth for more information.  The maps still seem quite a ways off, but they sure do seem promising…