The “Pre-Rendered” Advantage

Every Halo trailer that stands out in people’s minds has followed a pattern. From the announcement trailers for Halo: CE, to the in-engine trailer for Reach, every game has attempted to set a standard with its previews, a visual indicator of what we can expect from the game itself.

Halo 2 showed us the new and improved graphics over Halo 1 as well as our first in-game view of Earth, and Halo 3 showed us the updated textures and self-shading, as well as the mysterious Forerunner artifact under the African savannah.

Additionally, each trailer has marked the debut of the new soundtrack for each game, not only presenting us with a visual indicator of what is to come, but an auditory one as well. ODST (at the time known as “Recon”) and Halo Wars were the only two trailers to break from that mold and show pre-rendered trailers for their announcement, ODST because it was not technically a full game, but rather a spin-off of Halo 3, and Halo Wars because its gameplay and graphics were not suitable for an in-engine reveal.
However, things took a turn for the different with the fan community’s reaction to the Halo Wars cutscenes.

Because they were pre-rendered, and allowed for a much more cinematic makeup, they struck an appealing chord… one which allowed Halo fans to see elements of their favorite universe portrayed in a way which had previously only been described in the novels. Younger teams of Spartan-IIs in action, ship-to-ship engagements and naval maneuvers, and open combat. It was an amazing realization that in order to achieve the level of enjoyment out of the game that the designers wanted, the immersive in-game cutscenes were not required.

Enter Halo 4. On June 6th, the first announcement trailer for Halo 4 was revealed at E3 2011… and it, too, was pre-rendered.

If we are to follow the pattern established by all the major Halo releases up until this point, disregarding ODST, this would indicate based on a very shallow pattern analysis that Halo 4 might have pre-rendered cutscenes. Blasphemy, you say?

While I’m not outright suggesting that this will actually be the case – and in fact would be against it myself – I am suggesting that we all take a step back from our established “Halo comfort zone” (coining the phrase now), and consider how Halo 4 might actually benefit from this.

Just as with Halo Wars, it would allow us a much clearer picture into the Halo universe. Smaller miniscule details could be added throughout, giving the most scrutinous of us fans even more content to pour over for hours and hours. The constraints of rendering a cutscene in-engine would be eliminated, giving artists and animators more freedom to make their work as accurate as possible. Cutscenes wouldn’t be limited by the amount of characters and items populating the screen, and would obviously suffer no potential playback issues. If one were to really consider it, the sky is the limit… or perhaps the Ark. Either way, nothing would be impossible, and everything would be allowed for. There would be, quite simply, no reason for any of us (except those that exclusively enjoy fitting warthogs and other objects into cutscenes they shouldn’t necessarily be in) not to be happy with pre-rendered cutscenes, assuming that they are of the best possible quality and that the Spartans are not animated using mocap again.

Postmortem

Feel free to check out older Beyond the Frontline entries here.