New worlds, new weapons, new gameplay. Read about Metroid Prime 3: Corruption's secrets inside!

Gaming site IGN have interviewed several members of the Retro Studios team working on the final part in the Prime trilogy, including manager Kensuke Tanabe, director Mark Pacini and senior producer Bryan Walker. Firstly, the title's name was revealed to be about the corruption Phazon has brought throughout the series, and that this final chapter is about how this has come to be, and the newest wave of Phazon corruption which is happening on a planetary scale.

Samus herself will be corrupted, giving her access to a dangerous new enhanced range of weaponary. In this self-inflicted 'hyper-mode', you must balance using the Phazon weapons with the damage it causes to your own health - or the effects will be lethal.

70 people have been working on the title, with pre-production work starting back in October 2004 as development on Prime 2 was winding down. The demo of Wii controls working on the previous title shown at the Tokyo Game Show last year was part of a testing build the team had running while working on Corruption. The game was re-confirmed to be a launch title.

Voiced dialogue will be used in this chapter of the series, though the story will be paced similar to the other titles, with gameplay still the first and foremost priority. The story begins with several planets getting corrupted at the same time, with Samus getting corrupted as well. The main storyline will be to save all the planets and remove their corruption, though it is confirmed there will be other parts to the story as well (no doubt the return of Dark Samus, and the ongoing battles with the Space Pirates).

If you haven't seen a video of the E3 demo (go watch it now!), the beginning of Corruption features a spectacular fight with Ridley as you both fall down a deep shaft. It's kind of like Gandalf and the Balrog. This was apparently put in to allow gamers new to the series to experience a battle in close surroundings to act as an introduction to the point-and-shoot aspect of the game. It's also a really cool sequence.

Visors in the game will be the combat visor, the scan visor, the command visor - where you will be able to fly your ship via remote to have it come blast objects/enemies in specific situations as well as perform other tasks. The fourth visor will see the return of x-ray visor, which is promised to get more use this time. As well as seeing hidden platforms and walls, later in the game Samus will get a new beam weapon which allows you to shoot through walls to go with the visor. Players will also have to use it to find weakspots underneath players armor they must target.

Interestingly, this time round the beam structure is described as 'stacked'. Says Mark Pacini: "You'll start out with the power beam and then you'll get the plasma beam, and on top of that you'll get another beam. They will all inherit the abilities of the previous beam, but you won't have to switch between them. And the missile does the same thing. As well, the grapple beam has become a much more important part of the gameplay system because now you can manipulate and grapple things, and the grapple beam also stacks with abilities. So instead of it mainly being about a game where you switch beams, it's more a game about going between a beam, a missile and a grapple as your main trinity of weapons that you use to deal with certain situations."

Also going against the trend is the fact Samus will not loose her abilities and have to retrieve them throughout the game. Says Bryan Walker: "We did that for two games in a row. We didn't want to do it again." 60fps was confirmed as what the team were aiming for graphically, with this title set to be the best looking in the series to date.

Online play was ruled out, as the title will be focused on the single-player experience. Says Kensuke Tanabe: "I have also produced Prime Hunters and for that game I tried to use the Wi-Fi Connection for multiplayer. For Prime 3, I would like to concentrate more on the single-player so I decided not to implement multiplayer for Prime 3." He did however comment that the title could use Connect24. IGN suggested downloadable levels or suits, to which Tanabe replied "Yeah, maybe. But, this is just an idea, maybe we could send an e-mail or something depending upon how far a player progresses into the game." We'd prefer the suits, to be honest!

The full article can be read here!