I don't know exactly what he's referring to, but I can guess that it may be the brawl between the Chief and Locke on Meridian. If that is the case I wouldn't want to have that experience for myself in gameplay. I don't know how that fight could have been left to the player had it not been in the form of timed actions and button mashing.

He could have been referring to the introduction scenes for Blue and Osiris and I still can't see how that would have worked outside of giving free reign, which seems almost mindbogglingly impossible given the scale of that setting. The only reasonable method I could see is working is similar to ODST when we fell in the drop pods with limited use of the camera. That might have been a little weird considering the scale of the battle and the limited ways you could control the character throughout the scene. I'm totally fine starting off where we did and seeing the amazing scenes we did from a third-person perspective.

I just don't see how it's a "cardinal rule" and not just his own personal take on it, which is totally fine. I've never felt like I've been robbed when someone I play as, whether a protagonist with a linear storyline or a character I've crafted myself, does something absolutely fantastic on screen.

Some of the cinematics in Reach were weird and took me out of the experience entirely as it forced a first-person cinematic perspective that yanked the character model around for the sake of tension. The cutscene in the middle of "Winter Contingency" comes to mind where the camera shifts from first to third person rather abruptly. Then comes the action where Elite Zealots attack and you're tossed around like a ragdoll. The character begins to respond to the scene in first-person while you have no control whatsoever. Cutscenes like that make me yearn for whatever cool is going on that won't be animated in combat to be over so I can play. That just seems cheap.