According to reports coming out of Bungie, they will have their first team-wide playthrough of Halo 3:ODST next week.  Curtis Creamer, the games Executive Producer has stated in the lastest post on Bungie’s website that they now have reached a representative experience milestone.

For those of you who may not be in on the latest jargon of gaming production, Mr. Creamer explains what a representative experience milesstone is.  "This is the point where we have a build that’s playable from start to finish, bringing together all of the big technical systems, critical design elements, environments, cinematics, effects, audio, etc. The whole taco. Then we have the entire studio play it and tell us how much it sucks." He goes on "The important thing for the dev team, is that this is the build that we feel is playtestable from start to finish. That is, we’re ready to have real users (people from around Puget Sound) come in and play through the entire campaign. We’ll start that first thing next year. This is super important because having real gamers come in and play is the best way for us to understand if we’re making a quality experience. We try to do it as early as possible so we have enough time to react."

He further explains "It’s important to the bigger Bungie picture because hitting this milestone is a great indication that we’re on track for finishing the game on time and will be able to free up people to join the other projects that are also underway and counting on their help" We’re done with all the major code work, content is locked in, and the designs are finalized, so additional changes will primarily be refinements and iteration on the content and design, polishing and bug fixing."

So thats the latest news on Halo 3: ODST. They are still quite a bit away from announcing a release date, but it is good to know that they seem to be on track.