Rumors were ragging before E3 that Bungie was about to release some information regarding an upcoming project. Gamespot even said it had reliable insider information that detailed a new game in the Halo franchise which focused on squad based action and not on Master Chief. But Monday, the Microsoft press conference came and went without any word from the developer.

Now it seems that a countdown which was on the Bungie site and which hinted at a Wednesday date for an announcement, has been stopped and the countdown image itself is now obscured by a message from the president of Bungie, Harold Ryan, in which he states that he is sorry for the fact that the developer cannot say what it wanted to say at E3. The message reads "For the last several months, we've been building toward a reveal of something exciting that Bungie is working on. We were looking forward to sharing that with our fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were just changed by our publisher".

There are some fingers pointed at Microsoft as the publisher that prevented the announcement, but the message from Bungie does not mention any names, so it might be that the company is not working with another publisher.

But if we are talking about Microsoft, it just might be that the absence of any Halo related announcement is connected to the heavy emphasis that Microsoft has put on the Epic developed Gears of War 2. There is intense speculation that a Halo related announcement, especially one regarding a squad based first person shooter with tactical elements, would have taken some of the attention, or rather most of the attention, of E3 visitors off the sequel to the big Xbox 360 hit of 2007.

Whatever the situation might be, many people are surely very disappointed that Bungie did not get a chance to showcase its latest project and they are probably eagerly awaiting the announcement, whenever it may come.