I intentionally avoided, up until now, posting news about Halo 3 - pics notwithstanding - because, frankly, I don\'t care to learn about the levels or the neat gizmos the good Master Chief will be using this time around, ahead of time. I am to the point now that I just want to play the game and be surprised. But I broke my rule now because the latest news about Halo 3 steps beyond that broad line of \"developer hype.\" Today Bungie officially confirmed that Halo 3 will feature 4 player Co-op play over Xbox Live and System Link.

Bungie has been all hush hush about the single-player story line (my thanks to you Bungie), but they\'ve been dodgy about co-op online. On their website, they have this to say:

We\'ve been playing it for quite some time, and bluntly, having some of our greatest ever Halo experiences. We wanted to make sure all our \"t\"s were crossed and our \"i\"s dotted before unveiling this important new part of Halo 3\'s Campaign mode.

Apart from the horrifying network challenges this new mode presented us, were the various gameplay balance issues it adds to the fray. So we got it all together, polished it, and that\'s why we\'re revealing it now. As a result, you\'re going to want to play co-op as hard as you can stomach it. We\'d certainly recommend Legendary, but we\'ll be revealing some more ways to make the game more interesting and challenging for multiple players in the very near future.

Split-screen co-op will, as ever, be limited to two players. However, those two player can join other players games online. Pretty neat, although it\'s confirmed that the game won\'t allow you to jump in a game already-in-progress a la Crackdown.

And this time, you won\'t be just playing as four Master Chief replicas:

For fictional reasons, we decided to avoid Halo\'s slightly surreal compromise of two identical Master Chiefs and rather, use this opportunity to expand the Halo universe just a little bit. Player one will control the Master Chief, player two will control the Arbiter and players three and four will get the chance to control two brand new Elite characters.

These characters are N\'tho \'Sraom and Usze \'Taham (see pic) for players 3 and 4 respectively. Player 2 will be the Arbiter from Halo 2. I believe all we need now is a pronounciation key, Bungie.