"Originally Posted by Shaedon
So I've got a friend who is the uncle with someone working at the offices of Bungie. He refused to tell me what department the guy's in, but apparently he was hired earlier this year and is working on their next project for the Xbox 360. This project is Halo 3.

My friend is not a huge fan of the series (he's a PC FPS player, although he has played both games), but he was made privy to some interesting things through his nephew. Of course, I can't confirm if they're valid or not because I'm just taking his word at face value. I will, however, let you guys take a gander at what he told me.

1) It will have a darker and more gritty story than the previous games.

2) They're attempting to maintain an online cooperative component for the campaign supporting more than two players at once.

3) It has a lot of cinematics planned for it. The opening scenes apparently occur thousands of years before the timeline of the original Halo: Combat Evolved's story.

4) It will have a multiplayer mode which pits players against bots in scenarios that are directly connected to the story of the game.

5) They're attempting to implement both a map editor and a movie maker, which would allow players to send and receive their maps/movies through Xbox Live. This would apparently be on a separate disc, and they have an entire team working just on these two projects.

6) Zanzibar, Sidewinder and Hang Em High are said to return to the multiplayer mode, completely reworked. Zanzibar will be mangled and torn apart as though after the battle, the sky will be dark red. Sidewinder will have four legs instead of just two, with bases at each end. Hang Em High will have a massive tree at its center and the structure will be deteriorated.

7) They want to support more than fifty players on Xbox Live for certain maps."

This originally appeared on the teamxbox forums. This is a reprint of the original post. I don't think there is any big surprises here.