Don't read on if you haven't played Halo 3 (but want to) and/or don't want to have plot of Halo 3 revealed by references to it...
Is it just me, or did Bungie leave Halo 3 open for one last Halo game? Think about this. The Flood are destroyed, and the Covenant is badly damaged and divided, but it is not really defeated. I know Cortana told Master Chief that he had defeated them, but had he? The Covenant's civil war was still raging at the end.
So it is revealed to that the human race is the true identity of the ancient "Forerunners." What I think would be a cool way to truly end Halo once and for all would be to take that and run with it. Start the game a few years after the end of Halo 3. Master Chief is recovered, and wakes up to find that humanity has found some way to quickly absorb the knowledge of their ancestors, and has radically rebuilt Earth in only a matter of years.
Then, humans, armed with rough-around-the-edges versions of their ancient technology, enter the Covenant civil war on the side of the Sangheili, the Elites. Think of it as the "revenge of the Forerunners" on the covenant for nearly wiping them out again.
Anyway, I think it would be cool to play a game where humanity, not the alien races, is the true technological superpower. Stargate SG1 did that successfully, when it was revealed that the gate builders were a branch of the human race that evolved to being demigods.
Imagine... one last Halo game where Master Chief is fighting with weapons that make the Arbiter's weapons look like rocks and sticks. The Covenant watches in horror as humanity reclaims its position as the ancient power that dominated the galaxy, and crushes the Covenant loyalists under its boot.
It would be one hell of an ending.
And please, the ending where Master Chief goes into the cryo-pod just begs for a true series finale.
Don't even try to deny it.
My 15 year old says that Halo 3 is a prequel for some other Bungie game. I guess the ending that you see if you beat it at Legedary (I have) is supposed to suggest that. Since I'm not familiar with other Bungie games I didn't see the relationship. He said it was called "Marathon".
I've heard the same thing Digital. Mike, you always leave room for a sequal. just in case the budget gets a little tight down the road.
If your 15 year old is referring to Marathon, then I don't see how. From what little I know about the storyline of Marathon, there just isn't a whole lot of overlap between the Halo and Marathon universes.
I think in the case of Halo, they left it open for another big sequel, in the event that they have the budget to invest as much into it as Halo 3 got. Considering how much money they made on Halo 3 in just a few weeks of it being released (around $300M just on the first day), I think they could easily argue for another $100-$150M Halo game.
I just read today that there's some kind of Halo game in the works that's a pre-quel. No word on Master Chief involvement though. I think it was called the Halo Wars or something similar.
Check out Mass Effect if you're looking for a shooter that's kind of different. It's one of those games where you make choices that effect how the rest of the characters respond to you. There's a scene early on where you can punch out a hysterical guy and the rest of the characters looked like they were shocked by your thugishness. We laughed our asses off at that part.
Yeah, I've heard about Halo Wars. It's a real-time strategy game for XBox 360. Looks like C&C 3, but build around the Halo universe instead. I think it will be an awesome game to play once it comes out for Windows, and you can use a mouse with it. Even the Wii's controller is not nearly fine-grain to make a console RTS game enjoyable.