Halo 3 Planet

On Thursday morning at 7:07 a.m. PST, Bungie released a trailer for their Expansion for the Campaign of Halo 3.

Early Thursday morning, a trailer revealing appeared on the Xbox Live Marketplace and Bungie.net. It’s difficult to determine whether the trailer is an expansion of Halo 3, or a new game entirely. In the trailer, the Halo 3 logo is shown, as well as the words, “Prepare to Drop“.

On the Xbox Live Marketplace, the description reads:

“High action and deep mystery await players in the new Halo 3 campaign experience. Prepare to drop!”

Bungie had originally intended to make this announcement during E3 2008, but had their plans changed by their publisher Microsoft. Before changing, a mysterious counter had appeared on Bungie.net which was stopped, and then returned on Wednesday, Sep. 24th 2008.

Many speculated that this announcement could have been for the now confirmed “Mythic Map Pack“. According to Bungie.net, “We do have new maps still coming to Halo 3 but the release specifics are still being worked out with our partners.“

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

You may have seen Adam’s “Assembly” announcement on Twitter, or here on H3P earlier, and now a few videos are starting to emerge showing off some real gameplay on the map.

They’re all shaky cam, but the videos still do a decent job capturing the ins and outs of Assembly.

The videos were captured by CrunchGear and Kotaku.