: For me, perhaps the most interesting thing was seeing how AOTCR used to be.
: At around 2:52 (in any of the vids, but try the one with O'Donnell and
: Staten - here for 480p ), an Elite can be seen running for a Banshee in
: the LZ. Then MC is approaching one himself, except it seems to be on the
: side you land on.

: Then he's flying a Banshee in the first snowfield, and I wonder where it came
: from. I don't imagine it would've been from the LZ, unless the level had a
: different arrangement allowing simple access (you wouldn't expect players
: to be squeezing it through the first room). So I'm guessing it was
: somewhere in that field.

: Around 4:20 MC emerges there, and an Elite is just ahead, which is different
: of course. Another difference is the very pointy rock on the left - and
: later there's another pointy one. Evidently the rock geometry got tamed
: somewhat for the final game. Perhaps so rocks could more readily be used
: as perches - that would be my guess.

: In regard to the covie dropship landing in the first snowfield, that's
: something seen in the game's show footage which plays when you leave the
: main menu idle for a while, so I was already familiar with seeing that
: difference. Interestingly, this one drops two manned Ghosts. In H1 Ghosts
: do arrive by dropship in the later area with the huge tower, but they're
: initially empty. I wonder why Bungie decided against having them already
: manned.

: The Scorpion initially looks broken - something remarked on by O'Donnell at
: 5:55. Seem weird. I'm wondering if it was merely on a rock, which it then
: drives off. Hard to tell.

: One very minor thing. In the boarding prompt the game writes 'ghost', whereas
: H1 writes 'Ghost'.

: Another little point of terminology. At 0:36 you see "autosaving…
: done". Apparently it was only later that they rephrased things to
: have the term 'checkpoint'.

I'd like to know when these were filmed, I know there is a build of Halo from mid september floating around out there, but the person who was providing videos of it never got to AOTCR. But this footage lacks things like the heat meter on the PR, so this could be from august or july as far as we know.

AOTCR has a lot of cut content in it from what I've seen in the game files. The LZ banshee sequence is still left in, but is disabled. At one point I was going to re-enable it for SPV3, but couldn't see how it was really supposed to add anything to the game. Most of the dropship content is also in there, and that I modified and successfully re-enabled.

As far as dropping the ghosts off unmanned, they probably wanted to give the player the ability to take them out before they land, allowing the players actions to have more impact on how the encounter played out.

For the text, things like that literally take minutes to do, and I have seen other footage where the text is missing the >> Before objectives. Grammatically speaking Ghost should be capitalized because it is a name of the object, and I assume checkpoint was more player friendly than autosave.

I'm going to try and look more into what they had planned with the banshees... as that is something I'd like to have working as they intended. Something tells me though the first room before the bridge was supposed to be different, and perhaps you would have been able to fly it through?