14 DAY TRIAL // At long last Bungie tells us what it has been doing and what to expect from the studio. A trailer is now up and available to all those who want to see it. The problem is that, in true Bungie fashion, there's not much information to glean from the trailer.
One clue is in the Xbox Live information that accompanies the video. If you wait for the text to scroll, you will see that the following phrase appears: “High action and deep mystery await players in this new Halo 3 campaign experience. Prepare to drop!”. This might indicate an add on for Halo 3, but there's still a chance that the reference is just there to establish a point of contact with the Halo universe and the game can still entirely belong to other time frame.
There are a few lines of scrambled text in the video which show a date. Careful observers have made out the date to be January 6, 2009 and there's speculation that this might be the launch date for the new product. It seems odd to me to launch a game after the Christmas sales bonanza, so Bungie will probably wait before unleashing the game on the public until further in 2009.
The big question is whether Master Chief will make it into the new product from Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios. There are some pro arguments, the chief one being that the game is clearly connected with Halo 3, which was all about the Spartan. There are also arguments against a Master Chief presence, the most important one being that at the end of the last game, he was somewhere near a Shield World and the city showed in the trailer does not seem to be related to that.
Bungie is set to release more info shortly, just as the Internet fan community tries to find more details in the short video posted. Keep an eye open and check back for updates.