So the countdown is over and Bungie has released a trailer for their next … something. Halo 3 expansion … spin-off … thing.

The trailer, in predictable Bungie fashion, gives us little to work with. A bunch of pods fall from the sky and mess up some Earth town that appears to have already suffered from some unwanted Covenant attention. Text exhorts us to “prepare to drop.” Logos for Bungie and Microsoft Game Studios appear.

This is the announcement that was pulled from E3, right? Bungie’s next game? It’s not the Peter Jackson project, or Halo Wars, or the Microsoft-only project (if that exists), or that Gearbox weirdness from a while back, or another title update for Halo 3, or the Mythic maps we all know are coming. Right?

That last paragraph illustrates the problem in Halo land these days. There are so many projects — real and rumored — coming from so many places run through so much oblique marketing that it’s impossible to keep track of what’s what. It would be refreshingly contrarian if Bungie would just announce something with a plain, white-paper-and-letterhead press release.

And include a Visio flow-chart, too. This shit is confusing.