Halo 3 New Features Unveiled. It Can Still Suck Though!

Word on the Internet is that the latest EGM article on Halo 3 has some pretty damn interesting new stuff on Bungie's highly anticipated first-person shooter. EvilAvatar.com managed to snatch a few of those and thanks to them, we are able to share them with you too. Here's what the respective site posts, in terms of newly announced Halo 3 features (highlights):

"The campaign mode will be keeping score of your progress. That is, you gain actual points while playing, and the better you do (ie more headshots, more sticks, etc) the higher your score. These of course will be applied to online leaderboards. There is something called an Elephant in multiplayer that is literally a huge mobile base that can carry vehicles and players. The article said it's similar to the Sand Crawler the Jawas used in Star Wars. The strategy to use such a thing sounds very intersting.

The game features this pseudo-map maker called the Forge. The really unique thing about Forge is it's real time and co-op. You can place objects, weapons, crates, fushion cores, etc in real time with other players and then drop in and play the maps seamlessly. There are even a few game modes that have come out of this, like Jenga.
The maps can be uploaded and shared. You can log onto Bungie.net and browse the maps, and then queue them for download. As soon as you fire up Halo 3, the maps will be downloaded.

It's not a surprise that Bungie waited for so long to share the game's most impressive features with its fans. Just as the reporting site mentions, they pretty much did the same thing with the release of Halo 2, when implementing match reviews, web integration for stats and so on.

However, rumor has it that Halo 3 is going to suck. Team Xbox's César writes: "I refuse to believe Bungie was so comfortable with the development of Halo 3 that it let Microsoft know the game would be ready a couple of months earlier. If there's something all developers love to have is more time to polish and fine tune their games…and it happens that "more" is never enough in game development. [...] Game publishers carefully plan the release schedule for their titles and that's why I believe Halo 3 has intentionally been pushed forward. The question is why?"

So, while one end of the Internet is screaming Halo 3 will launch to be the bomb of the century, as far as the FPS genre is concerned, the other end is trying to shed some light on why the developer isn't at all ready to launch the game. Who'd have thought not everyone would be on the same level regarding Halo 3...?