Joe Staten on gamestate

Joseph Staten, Halo’s Cinematics Director, wrote to clarify one of my biggest gripes about Halo – the lack of saved gamestate in cutscenes. It turns out that gamestate (what the game looks like, around you) IS saved… in almost all cases. The few exceptions happen to be the few I noticed. (Figures, dunnit?) From the horse’s mouth:

The gamestate right before the cutscene begins almost always remains unchanged (with respect to dead bodies, dropped weapons, decals, etc.) for the duration of the cutscene. In some instances we chose to purge scenes of “garbage” (dead bodies, et al) in order to solve performance issues, but I’d say this occurs in maybe 5% of Halo’s cinematics.

The only consistent gamestate “error” during the cinemas is the fact the “Cinematic Chief” only shows up with the assault rifle rather than whatever the Player is carrying. Unfortunately, it would have taken some special code and scripting to rectify this error, and other things were more important–like making our ship date :’)

This information (and Marty’s information yesterday concerning sound quality on stereo TVs) have been added as footnotes to HBO’s Halo review, so that people can see Bungie’s response to our concerns.