Major Halo announcement soon

Bungie is promising "a major announcement" this week offering details of its new maps for Halo 2 amidst rumours of a full-blown expansion for the game.

The hullabaloo kicked off late last week when eagle-eyed servants of the Master Chief spotted an update on Microsoft's Korean website listing a Halo 2 expansion called "X-Pack".

Microsoft hasn't commented on the entry yet, but the X-Pack - whatever it is - has since been removed from the site's release schedule, and Bungie's response has done little to quash the rumour mongering.

Although the note in this week's Bungie mailbag did claim that "some dates, details and ideas out there...are actually wrong," it didn't specify which or how. "We can't talk about how and when the new maps will be released," it said.

However, Bungie did state that its "entire plan is designed to make new content available for everybody, those with Xbox Live and those without Xbox Live," which suggests that some form of packaged update is on the cards.

Downloadable content for Halo 2 has been mooted since before the game was even released, but so far - apart from a couple of patches - there's been nothing on the sort of scale we expected since the game's November launch.

As for the X-Pack? Your guess is as good as ours at this point, so we'll leave you to speculate in peace.