Call of Duty 4 has been dominating the “Xbox 360 Top LIVE Titles” list for a number of weeks now, forcing Master Chief to step down a notch a little bit sooner than anyone probably anticipated. But Bungie has no plans to give up that easily - they’re making battle plans, prepping new content for Halo3, some of which we’ve already seen, and fully plan to fight back.

Bungie’s community lead Brian Jarrard said at GDC last week that they’re not walking away from Halo 3. “..I think we’ll continue to evolve and I expect there to be a back-and-forth [between us and COD4] for a while,” he said.

He also talked about how he thinks user-created content has gotten a bit out of control and that a spring-cleaning would be in order. “For a new person that just wants to find something fun that somebody else made, we don’t feel very good about the way we’ve done that.”

As for CoD4’s Xbox LIVE success, Jarrard credits Infinity Ward’s clever perks system and “these little carrots that are a really powerful incentive to keep playing the game”.

“A lot of us are Call of Duty fans. It’s great for the ecosystem and for the platform that we have this competition, right? With Halo 2 we were in a unique situation where we had a monopoly for three straight years, and we really haven’t seen a decline in the Halo 3 numbers, but Call of Duty’s doing really well,” he added.

[See also: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare gallery, Halo 3 gallery]