Writing in his weekly update on the game's progress, Bungie's Frankie O'Connor revealed that the decision to avoid pre-rendered cinematics was chosen to make sure players remained as immersed as possible in the game. "It’s a conscious decision based on a simple philosophy," explained O'Connor. "Don’t yank the player out of the game, and dazzle them with graphics that are alien to their gameplay experience.
"Don’t get me wrong, some of my favorite cinematics ever do exactly that, and in my opinion, successfully," he continued. "Final Fantasy, Dead Or Alive, Tekken even, all use high quality CG renders to display their cinematics. And the results are fantastic. They propel narrative and they’re a reward for completing gameplay tasks.
"In Halo 3 though, we made a deliberate and difficult choice. Believe it or not, it would in some ways have been easier to just storyboard this and hand it off to someone like Digital Domain to render into CG. Instead, we took the harder and seemingly counterintuitive route so that our cinematics will blend, as seamlessly as possible with our gameplay."
O'Connor also admitted that lessons had been learned from Halo 2, pointing out that the cinematics in that game weren't as polished as the team behind the title had hoped. "In Halo 2, we simply didn’t have the time or resources to make the cinematics the way we wanted them to be," confessed O'Connor, adding, "They were compromised by deadlines and resources and while the results were heroic and herculean achievements of hard work and talent, they simply weren’t as polished or pretty as we wanted them to be."
The Halo 3 multiplayer beta begins on May 16.
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