Bungie appears to be playing down expectations of online co-operative Halo 3. Much as they'd like to do it, Frank O'Connor has reportedly told Electronic Gaming Monthly that they won't sacrifice quality for a bullet-point on the box.
"We're not dumb. We know that people want it and we're trying to make it happen," O'Connor said in comments allegedly reproduced from the June issue of the US mag. "I think the biggest problem for us for online co-op is that we have a situation where you can be in a Warthog with five troops, almost a mile away from the other player.
"That's a significant challenge. And there's lots of design things you could do to prevent that from happening, but they would make it not feel like Halo any more. If we can make it happen in a way that works well, we will - and if it works badly, we won't."
Bear in mind that we've not seen EGM ourselves, but write-ups of the feature cite previous unsourced claims that Bungie could try to add it as downloadable content following the game's 26th September release.
Not that any of this will jeopardise the two-player LAN/split-screen co-operative, while O'Connor himself was at E3 last week stoking rumours of four-player co-op with "wouldn't that be cool?" style responses to questions on the subject during Halo 3 presentations.