It's hard not to love the pulse-pounding effects of the Gravity Hammer.

In lieu of Halo 3: ODST’s arrival onto the laps of Xbox 360 gamers around the world on the 22nd of September (next month, FYI), we manage to grab lead producer Curtis Creamer to share with us some things on the game. Think of this as a supplement to this article here and the first part of this article here.

GameAxis: When exactly did Halo 3: ODST started pre-production? How did it came about? Was there a feeling that the Halo Trilogy felt “incomplete” in some way?

Curtis Creamer: We started conceptualizing for ODST in March, 2008. We felt that we had done a good job through Halo 1,2,3 of telling the Master Chief’s story, and we wanted to tell a different story with a different hero for our next game. We were very excited about trying some new directions for a Halo game by creating a type of detective story structure to the narrative in ODST, and focusing on the story of what happened in New Mombasa during the time between Halo 2 and Halo 3 because a lot of our fans wanted to know what happened on Earth while the Master Chief was away.

CC: There is quite a bit of both, but to be clear, ODST is not a stealth game. As the Rookie (our new hero), you spend much of your time alone in New Mombasa at night trying to figure out what happened to your squad mates after your orbital drop assault on the covenant carrier goes wrong. Since as a human character, an ODST, you are not quite as strong as a Spartan, you need to be careful about how you approach patrols of Covenant you meet while exploring the city. It is to your advantage to be more tactical. You can choose to fight, or try to avoid. During the flashback scenes where you play as your squad mates, the action will be more intense, but you will often have other squad mates with you, or even UNSC marines to back you up.

CC: We haven’t made any changes to FireFight since E3.

CC: For ODST, it was necessary for us to make some large additions to the AI system for the enemies. New Mombasa is an open city where the player, and Covenant, can move freely. In past Halo games, the environments were more linear in nature, and our AI was developed to work very well in that situation. In ODST, we had to design new systems to allow the Covenant to patrol the city in intelligent ways, and react to the player in intelligent ways no matter where, or from which direction, the player engages the Covenant. We also made some more subtle improvements to the A.I so that the Covenant would utilize cover (cars and crates being a few examples) more effectively.

Beyond that, there were many gameplay systems that we needed to adjust for the differences of playing as an ODST vs Spartan. We’ve brought back the stamina/health system rather than recharging shields, and the ODST has a “VISR”, which is a low light vision enhancement system that also helps you out with identifying enemies.

CC: In ODST, we have 2 new weapons. 1) A sound suppressed SMG. It is very good for taking down the shields on Covenant enemies and has a little bit of zoom 2) A sound suppressed pistol. If you are a fan of the pistol from Halo 1, you’re really going to like this one because it feels very powerful. You can finish off unshielded enemies with a single head shot, it has zoom, and you can fire it as fast as you can pull the trigger.

CC: Probably the hardest thing for us during development was creating the city of New Mombasa. It’s the largest urban environment that we’ve ever created for a Halo game, and because it is an open city where the player can move in any direction they like, it presented some technical hurdles that we had needed to solve before.

CC: I think it’s interesting what Microsoft has chosen to do with the Halo franchise. While I’ve been traveling through Asia, I’ve heard many people say that it could bring new interest to Halo by people who enjoy anime. (Halo Legends, being an example)

CC: No, we announced at E3 this year that we will be releasing Halo Reach in the fall of 2010. One of the great things about ODST is that the disk contains the invitation to the Halo Reach Multiplayer Beta. When the beta is released, all you have to do is insert your ODST disk and you will be able to play the Halo Reach Beta. So hold on to your disk!

CC: It’s no secret that Bungie has been working on other projects outside of Halo. I can’t speak to any details about it just now, but when the time is right, we’ll let everyone know. (Possible Myth or Oni sequel?)