Gravemind has produced what may well be the single most exhaustive commentary on the Halo series to date, covering not only comparisons to Halo 1 and Halo 2 including each weapon and every vehicle, but single player and multiplayer level design as well. He caps it off with a series of mostly level-headed suggestions for Halo 3.

Despite his predilection for citing some pretty sketchy sources, he also is familiar with the analyses of Finn, Mothergoat, and Mike Miller.

Certainly not everyone is going to agree on all points; as he confesses himself in the HBO forum post linking to the article, he generally prefers Halo 1 over Halo 2 although he did enjoy the latter, and many of the suggestions amount to "make Halo 3 more like Halo 1". Luckily Frankie has already said that at least in some respects this is going to be true.

There's almost too much meat here to pull out any one morsel as representative, but since Campaign is close to my heart, one particular suggestion tastes pretty good to me:

As for the stage designs themselves, they should be huge. The stages in Halo 2 were supposed to have been really big. In fact, it was claimed that you could fit the entire Halo 1 Campaign into a single canyon in Halo 2 — an obvious exaggeration. However, due to the huge draw distances upwards of 13 or 14 miles made possible by the 360’s graphics capabilities (see below), there’s no reason that the stages cannot span a rather huge distance. Most of the larger stages in the previous games were only a couple of miles long from beginning to end, so I fully expect the stages in Halo 3 to be two or three times as long as that at the very least. Furthermore, I expect the outdoors stages to have parts that are much more wide open than even what was seen in Halo 1. It’d be neat to test your sniping skills against enemies that are a kilometer away. I want to see something that gives the effect of Assault on the Control Room or Two Betrayals, but on a much grander scale.

Be warned: this is a very long and detailed read; it might have been easier to digest as a series than as a single long piece, but here it is. Take breaks if you have to, but it's well worth it.

The latest Bungie Spotlight is on former community member, current Bungie staffer Cunbelin, and his contributions to Halo 3:

Well My most recent item was to remake the classic human crate, better, faster, stronger! Well better at least. I've got a long list of those kinds of items both to be brought up to the Halo 3 standards and new ones to be created. I'd go into specifics but things shift almost daily in priority so it's hard to say what else I'll be working on.

Cunbelin also gets kudos for copping to being a "rampancy snob" in the early days of his Bungie fanhood. The check's in the mail.

If you need any more proof that what goes around, comes around-- usually to end up smacking you in the face when you turn around-- read this story at Joystiq alleging that not making Halo 4 would be stupid. I saw the story linked at HBO. Interestingly enough, the only citation in the Joystiq story for the idea that Bungie has already "disproven" the "rumor" that Halo 3 will be the last game in the Halo series is-- you guessed it-- another HBO post, that one following up on forum speculation that a rumored new non-Halo Bungie title and Eric Nylund's new Microsoft project were one and the same. Nylund has already nicely put the kibosh on this one in his blog; but more to the point, the HBO post that Joystiq cites is the same one debunking the rumor about Nylund and Bungie's new projects.

So a news post at a fansite, citing forum posts at that same fansite, making a speculation based on another gaming site repeating an unsubstantiated rumor and another one citing a vague claim, somehow gets cited as a definitive source for a statement that is in direct opposition to things Bungie has already said more than once, while in the same post discrediting a previous, related rumor-based speculation.

Sometimes I think Hamlet wasn't being ironic enough.

Just in case you've managed to get this far without following me: Bungie has said Halo 3 is it. If they get their way, it will be. They didn't want to make Marathon games forever, they didn't want to make Myth games forever, and now they don't want to make Halo games forever. Halo doesn't need to be, nor should its fans want it to be, the next Final Fantasy. Microsoft will no doubt need Bungie to save its bacon once again, but it will have to be done with new properties; and if everybody is lucky we'll get a glimpse at what one of those might be fairly soon.

However, to assume that Halo must continue for another two or twenty games based on being one of the "top thirty" gaming franchises in history is just... stupid.

Expect to see this on Spong in two weeks, and then on Digg the week later, before finally making the cover of Time Magazine when they name Master Chief the Cyborg of the Year.