It seems that Bungie just doesn’t know when to stop overwhelming us with tons of new details on their upcoming heavyweight Halo 3. Only a few days ago we unloaded a galore of information with regard to the single-player campaign, Forge, and microtransactions. Now, we‘ve received new details on the game’s co-op aspect and difficulty. Not only that, but also a great deal of leaked shots from the Epsilon build.

CNET.com.au recently caught up with Bungie’s Frank O’Connor for a Q&A session, discussing Halo 3 in great detail, including its difficulty system:

CNET.com.au: Tell us about the game’s difficulty. How will the gameplay experience change depending on what difficulty level you’re playing it at?

Frank O’Connor: You’ll actually encounter completely different scenarios sometimes. There are obviously different classes of bad guys, and their classes aren’t just an armour permutation or a colour palette swap — they behave very differently, they carry different materials, they use different weapons. When playing on Heroic, you’re going to encounter things that weren’t there before, like turrets, whole leagues of snipers, and different types of vehicles will come in. And again that changes in co-op too. So Heroic and Legendary on co-op will once again be different to what they are on solo. There are also other ways to make the game behave differently that the user will have a lot of control over.

CNET.com.au: But in terms of enemy AI, will they behave differently if you’re playing on Heroic or Legendary?

FO: Absolutely — they’ll throw grenades more often, they’ll deploy shields more often, they’ll take cover more often, and they’ll flank you more often. Their behaviour is massively different depending on difficulty level.

Frankie then explained that Heroic was the most suitable difficulty for the single-player campaign, as well as co-op. He also advises Halo 2 veterans to switch right to Heroic (or even better, Legendary) on their first play-through, since that difficulty level poses greater challenges and stands out as being “a lot more interesting” compared to the lesser normal difficulty.

Moving on, the next subject that the guys talked about was co-op, giving out details on how the storyline and co-op fit together, along with other co-op specifics that fans should take note of.

CNET.com.au: You’ve previously unveiled four-player co-op — one Master Chief, one Arbiter, and two Elites. Can you play a four-person game throughout the entire campaign mode?

FO: Yes, all the way through.

CNET.com.au: How does that fit into the game’s storyline then?

FO: If you’re solo, the Arbiter is with you for some of the missions. There are some plot dependencies that can take him out, but as you’ll see when you play through it, he doesn’t have to be gone from your side, which is why it still makes sense when he’s there during co-op. And the two other Elites — they’re not exactly throwaway characters. They have real back stories and bios, and so on. But they serve no functional purpose in the cinematics — they serve a purpose in the fiction, and they’re important allies of the Arbiter, but you don’t see them in cinematics. We wanted to make sure that when you were playing in co-op, the fiction seems correct, smooth, and seamless.

CNET.com.au: Was it tricky to fit in these extra players into the storyline?

FO: Not really. We had plenty of time to plan it so it wasn’t a big deal. We made that decision early on, and it was a difficult decision because people all want to be the Chief. But four Chiefs running around doesn’t make a lick of sense. And people had started to dig the Arbiter, so we thought about how we could work that in. We couldn’t give people marines to play because marines can’t run as fast as the Chief, they don’t take as much damage, they don’t have the shield mechanics, so it just would have been kind of a mess for the other three players unless we went in this direction.

CNET.com.au: Can you jump into co-op at any stage of the game?

FO: Yes and no. Any of the campaign rally checkpoints that you’ve opened up, you can start from. There are specific checkpoints so it’s nice and seamless when you go in. There are usually two or sometimes three in each level.

Lastly, 360WTF was fortunate enough to obtain loads of (low quality) screenshots from the Halo 3 Epsilon. The following showcase the newly announced flamethrower being used to set a tree on fire (without luck, unfortunately), the Forge mode in action, the third campaign mission titled “Tsavo Highway”, and more.

We’ll have more on Halo 3 very soon.

Thanks to Jamzy No 2 and Innocentgamer for submitting.