Witness the Master Chief’s return to finish the fight between the Covenant, the Flood, and the entire Human race in this dramatic, pulse-pounding conclusion of the original Halo trilogy. With the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance, the Master Chief returns to uncover an ancient secret hidden beneath the sands of Africa, which could hold the key to humanity’s salvation or destruction – an object that could change the tide of the Human-Covenant conflict.
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Not every piece of Halo 3 downloadable content cost money. Cold Storage, the game's seventh multiplayer map, was released completely free on July 7, 2008, timed deliberately to land on Bungie's own internal holiday, 'Bungie Day,' as a thank-you gift to the entire community.
Halo 3 ran on a purpose-built engine that pushed the Xbox 360 with techniques that were still fairly novel for console games at the time, including high dynamic range lighting, global illumination, and depth-of-field effects layered into cutscenes to make them feel more cinematic.
Long before the 'Believe' campaign took over, Halo 3's very first public showing came at E3 2006 with a teaser trailer built around the tagline 'Finish the Fight,' a phrase Bungie chose specifically to sell the game as the closing chapter of the original trilogy.
Halo 3's ranked multiplayer used Microsoft Research's TrueSkill system to calculate player skill, a ranking algorithm originally designed as a more flexible successor to chess's Elo rating system, adapted here to handle team-based matches with more than two players at once.
Halo 3 introduced a veto system to matchmaking that gave players a democratic say over what they played next. Once a map and gametype loaded, a ten-second countdown began, and if the majority of the lobby hit veto in time, the game would throw out that selection and roll a new one.
Halo 3 introduced the M313 Elephant, a lumbering mobile base on wheels that players could drive, customize with Forge objects, and use as a rolling fortress in multiplayer, most famously on the desert map Sandtrap where it doubles as a spawn point and cover on wheels.
The entire Halo 3 campaign is told across just ten levels, each one opening with a terse two-line mission briefing, from Sierra 117's 'Rise up. Start the fight' through to the final level Halo's instruction to light the ring and finish off the Flood for good.
Scattered through the campaign are hidden data terminals that, when accessed, unlock short archived recordings tied to the Gravemind and the ancient Forerunner-Flood war. They're entirely optional, but for players who track them all down they add a whole layer of backstory that the main campaign never spells out directly.
Before the Gravemind moves to attack Earth, it allows a single Flood-infested ship carrying a recorded message from Cortana to slip through, intending to use it as bait to lure the Master Chief to his death. The catch is that the Gravemind never actually learns what the message says, and it ends up steering the story in a direction that works against the Flood instead.
