Halo rumors are always nice especially because there's a huge number of fans of the franchise that can't wait to hear something interesting about the Halo universe and the new games set in it. For the moment, we know that there's only one game related to the multi million selling first person shooter which is in development and that is Ensemble's real time strategy called Halo Wars.

There was talk that Bungie, which is now an independent company, was going to announce something related to Halo at the E3 trade conference earlier this year but Microsoft pulled the announcement because it feared it would overshadow their whole presentation.

And now there are some rumors, as presented by the Official Xbox Magazine, that Gearbox might be getting ready to develop something Halo-related, basically the fourth game in the series. The story is that the boss of Gearbox Software, Randy Pitchford, stated earlier in the year that his company was getting ready to tackle a project that was bigger than anything they had done before. It might just be that he was talking about developing another Halo first person shooter which would be the launch title for the next Xbox console. Pitchford said that "When you find out what this is, you'll likely agree that I can't oversell this one".

The only problem is that the Xbox 360, the current version of the Microsoft made console, is nowhere near obsolete and Microsoft is not saying anything about a possible replacement. Analysts are also predicting that, mainly because of the huge development costs of the current generation of hardware, companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo might be tempted to wait until 2014 until they release new consoles, with better technology.

What does all of this mean? Well, Gearbox could be developing a new Halo game but there's little chance for us mere mortals to see it before 2014. So, we'd better learn to enjoy Halo Wars.