It's perhaps the most anticipated game for the Xbox 360 console since Microsoft first announced the console way back in May 2005. Now its just three months from release as developer Bungie is now in full crunch mode on developing Halo 3, the third game in their multi-million selling sci-fi first person shooter series. The developer recently concluded their multiplayer beta test for the game. At May's press event for the beta, FiringSquad got a chance to chat briefly with Bungie's Frank O'Connor where we learned more about the Halo franchise beyond the beta release.

O'Connor is best known for his work on the Bungie.net web site as he writes the weekly Friday updates on Halo 3's development. He told us his official title at Bungie is Writing Lead. "I'm charge of the small writing group," he told us, "We do everything from the game script to the combat dialog to working on the Marvel graphic novel and comic books, the books, the action figures, the Peter Jackson stuff and so on and so on."

One of the cool features show in limited form in the multiplayer beta was the movie maker feature which in the final game will give players a way to not just take demo movies of their Halo 3 sessions but also have editing features as well. But what about a map editor for the game as well? While the PC versions of Halo and Halo 2 have some kind of mod features, their console counterparts had no such editors. When we asked O'Connor about a possible Halo 3 map feature, he said only, "We will certainly give the player far more control over the types of game that they play." He would not comment beyond that.

And what about the single player experience in Halo 3 which has only been mentioned in passing in favor of the multiplayer side of the game? Bungie ended the story in Halo 2 on a rather abrupt note. O'Connor admitted that plot choice caused much debate among Halo fans. "The more vocal ones were the ones with the most negative opinions and that's always the case. A lot of people were perfectly satisfied with it. A lot of people don't even play the campaign. I think, however, in Halo 3 I imagine that the old adage, 'You can't please all the people all the time," will be bent a little bit. I think we are actually going to make fans of both games, (even) monomaniacal fans of both games, pretty happy." O'Connor, however, pretty much squashed any thoughts of a single played demo being released for the game, saying, "I wouldn't hold my breath."

Even though Halo 3 is close to being completed there are other Halo games under development. At the moment, the focus is on Halo Wars, the Xbox 360 exclusive RTS game set in the Halo universe that was announced at X06 last September. "We are working in close concert with (developer) Ensemble on the fiction of Halo Wars," O'Connor said of Bungie's participation, "but Ensemble makes excellent RTS games; they don't need us to tell them how to do that. We are working with them to make sure that its canonical and the characters and the fictional events in there are awesome. Honestly, I think they are going to knock it out of the park. They are a great developer and a joy to work with as a partner."

The other Halo game under development is still top secret. Also announced at X06 in September is the Halo project that's being developed by Weta Interactive, the new game development studio formed in New Zealand by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. O'Connor would only said, "We are in close communications with those guys and there are some exciting things coming down the line."

Beyond the Halo games, the franchise is branching out into other areas. One area that was on the fast track last year was a Halo feature film which would have been filmed in New Zealand with Peter Jackson as an executive producer. Unfortunately the two movie studios who were signed on to the film, Universal and 20th Century Fox, pulled their funding support for the Halo movie last fall. "It was pretty disappointing," O'Connor said of the film's production shutdown, "but you go into that kind of big media Hollywood deals with that expectation. These are complicated companies with complicated motivations and in Hollywood its not unusual but very common for competitors to have to cooperate in ways that are tenable or untenable. In this case it wasn't tenable for this timing." O'Connor stressed that the Halo movie wasn't dead, just on hiatus.

After we talked with O'Connor last May, Fox Licensing announced a new merchandising deal for the Halo franchise. While that deal was not in place at the time of our interview, we asked if we would see more Halo "stuff" like, for example, a lunch box. O'Connor told us, "If there was a company that made awesome lunch boxes and most of our fans wanted a Halo lunch box, yeah. We would do it. But we are very, very careful not to just make stuff for the sake of making it. We will make things that we think are cool if we can find a partner that makes them."

Next month, Marvel Comics will launch their first Halo comic book mini-series, following up on the sales success of 2006's hardcover Halo anthology comic. The mini-series, Halo: Uprising, will be written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Alex Maleev, who previously worked together on the gritty super hero crime series Daredevil. At first glance that team doesn't sound like it would be the first choice to handle a big sci-fi epic. O'Connor, however, "I think there is a lot of gritty,realistic and frightening Halo environments to look at," he told us, "Obviously we have seen the story and some of the art. I think fans loe seeing Halo reimagined, for one thing. I think that Bendis and Maleev's take on it is going to be spectacular, honestly."

While Halo 3 is assured of a huge sales launch when it is released in late September, there are other major games that are due for release this fall which could compete for gamer's dollars. O'Connor told us they don't worry much about how other games will affect Halo 3 sales. "Bungie staff love playing games," he said, "so honestly when we think about competition like Grand Theft Auto 4 coming out this fall, we are not thinking about, 'Are we going to sell more than them?". We are thinking about, 'How can we get our marketing guys to get us a free copy of Grand Theft Auto so we can play it?'". O'Connor said they will let the business folks at Microsoft worry about reaching sales expectations. "All we do is worry about our own quality bar and how do we exceed that and how do we make a game that we all enjoy playing. We play our own game for recreation all the time."

Bungie was known as a multi-franchise game developer before being purchased by Microsoft in the year 2000 with games like Marathon, Oni and Myth under their belts. After Halo 3, will Bungie work on a non-Halo game for the first time in seven years? O'Connor told us, "I guarantee that Bungie Studios will work on a non-Halo game but the timing of that will be something you will find out in the next months or years. But we are not going to commit to our next project until we are ready to commit to it."

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