And now, for a few moments, we venture into the breach that straddles the realm of the official announcement and the territory of the unfounded rumor.
Louis Wu at HBO is reporting the rather specious claim forwarded to HBO by Greg that a site named GamePlay will take your preorder for Halo 2 right now-- despite their admission that there is no pricing information for the title. They've set their price at a shade under $45 pounds sterling-- that's about 70 or so Euros, or, for you Yanks out there, about $66.50. (Warning, this includes UK sales tax). They claim this should go down.
The UK retailer is claiming that Halo 2 was just officially announced at this year's E3.
But that seems like a bit of a stretch-- Bungie certainly never mentioned anything about Halo 2, nor did they show anything. But statements by Microsoft PR talked about an online enabled Halo title, and Bungie reps have repeatedly denied the existance of any Halo 1.5 title that would be online enabled.
That leaves any reasonable thinking person to conclude that:
1) There will not be an online-enabled version of Halo 1
2) There will be an online-enabled Halo game
This pretty much leaves open the only possible conclusion that:
3) There will be a sequel (or prequel) to Halo, for argument's sake called Halo 2 , that will have online play via Microsoft's Xbox Live service (as MS announced).
Now, Louis is warning us that Halo 2, as such, has not officially been announced-- but this seems a bit like splitting hairs. True, no positive statements regarding a Halo sequel have been made by Bungie personnel themselves. They've only told us what they won't be doing. But if we keep making these kinds of disctinctions we may reach a point where it's impossible to know anything about what Bungie is doing because of conflicts between statements made by Bungie and MS-- and to completely discount statements made by MS representatives really isn't a viable long-term strategy, given that at the moment they're the only one making statements about products and services that fall outside the immediate scope of what Bungie is doing-- things like Xbox Live, which Bungie games will most certainly support but which Bungie probably doesn't have authority or permission to comment on directly.