: Not according to Staten, and he's right there giving commentary in front of
: Marty O'Donnell and Jason Jones, and they don't contradict him:
: Joe Staten: "And I think as Sgt. Johnson goes through these lines
: here, written by the unforgettable Matt Soell, I think this was the moment
: where-- [...]
I have access to the filenames used in the first game. I'll check it...I haven't had the chance yet. I was pretty sure it was there.
: A discussion ensues about a Warthog crashing sound that's actually been
: removed from the recording. Onscreen, Johnson is delivering his
: difficulty-sensitive pep talk to the marines.
: Joe Staten: I think this was the moment where we realized that Sgt. Johnson
: was going...
: The subject gets changed. They don't return to it until the Master Chief is
: taking custody of Cortana on the bridge.
: Joe Staten: Well the great thing about, sort of, Bungie games is that we
: have this really cool stable of actors, right, that stick around from game
: to game.
: Jason Jones: All two of them?
: Joe Staten: All two of them. You got to get rid of the guy that plays the
: grunt, though, he's a hack. In Halo we didn't really have that many more
: characters than... you've got Keyes, Cortana, and the Chief and Spark, but
: the cast was so much... I mean, even Sergeant Johnson wasn't called
: Sergeant Johnson. He was just called Sniper Sergeant.
: We really just weren't too worried in Halo 1 about tying up loose ends.
: It's also possible for people to go back and play that game and not be
: assaulted by that information because it gets processed and discarded,
: like the timestamps. I doubt I've played Halo 1 campaign less than you,
: but there are discrepancies that I'll never notice the way they do because
: I'm processing them in an entirely different way; you're actively trying
: to reconcile them against your memory, and I'm not. To me, if the outline
: looks like the PoA, my brain says "yep that's the Autumn"
: because it recognizably is in a big picture way. When I see different
: details, I discard the differences.
: A priority? Sure. The only priority? Certainly not. A top priority? Depends.
: I'd say, most of the time, not. If it doesn't change the plot or tone, I'd
: say not, and that's generally the case with design details or calendar
: dates.
: Certainly there's plenty of stuff that has remained consistent. I think the
: things they changed, they had reasons to. Sometimes the new stuff works
: better, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the new stuff fails in a way
: that's completely separate from why the old stuff was bad, and makes it
: look like the old stuff was better, but taking that route is really the
: easy way out. The easy way out would be to change nothing, but I don't
: think that's the way people who make original content think about the task
: at hand.
: I'd agree, but I think it's untenable regardless of the medium to expect a
: work that isn't necessarily intended by its creators to spawn a multimedia
: empire (even if its owners always intended that, which itself is arguable)
: to force them into consistency with the earliest iteration just because
: it's the earliest. There's also evidence that, despite how much a lot of
: fans, myself included, really loved it, there were things in Halo 1 that
: Bungie was not happy with.
: Perhaps one of them was the design of the Pillar of Autumn?
:
: Joe Staten: The really funny thing is about all the stuff with the Pillar
: of Autumn is that all of these shots...
: Jason Jones: ...is that Paul Russell built it in, like, four minutes?
: (laughs)
: Joe Staten: (laughs) Other than that.
:
What we know about the Autumn's design is that the exterior was designed and built near the end of the game and the interior had been designed and built closer to the beginning. Two people designed the interior and exterior. It was likley built fast, but there's a lot of things that are too precise to have been a rush job in my examining the exterior over the years.
: Certainly Jones is exaggerating for comic effect here, but think about it--
: the PoA is only seen from the outside for a few seconds in the opening
: cutscene, and then for a single 360 shot in the intro cutscene of the last
: level. That's it. Given Halo's carved-in-stone release date (Xbox launch
: day) and the accelerated schedule to port it to the Xbox system, and the
: material that got cut, and the need to re-use geometry to fill out the
: game, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Pillar of Autumn model was a
: rush job, and that someone wasn't happy with it-- enough so that when
: given the chance in later games, it was changed.
: When the changes don't alter the meaning of the work, I think it's only
: respect to the artist to allow them a little artistic license. I think
: it's only when an artist or artists clearly abuses that license-- the
: Lucas case-- that they shouldn't be afforded that freedom to define,
: within limits of the best available technology and the best of their
: efforts-- to define how their universe looks and feels.
I wish the new Autumn was better. One of the issues with the Halo 1 Autumn was the internal compartments not fitting properly within the exterior shape. One thing that was bang-on though was the bridge. The Reach Autumn, unless they are going to redesign the bridge shape too is more narrow than the Halo 1 version so even the bridge won't fit the exterior without parts sticking out.
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