: I don't know. In the case of level 2, perhaps during development a Banshee
: pilot fell out and Bungie were like "Whoa! We need to guard against
: this and make the Banshees unboardable". Or maybe Banshees were made
: unboardable from an early time just as a matter of policy, and nobody ever
: thought about it.

: However, I get the impression that things are a bit random. For example,
: pilot clumsiness could equally cause any of level 5's Banshees to become
: vacated, yet they're all boardable. And to mention one thing unrelated to
: Banshees, jumping causes checkpoint delay in all levels except The
: Library. I'm wondering if such inconsistencies arose because of different
: programmers being responsible for different levels. But I really don't
: know much about how the development was structured. Anyone?

Huh, you might be onto something there. A lot of games usually followed that structure, and I know Halo 3 did, but then again Halo was a smaller pre-HD project so I'm not sure if they had set mission designers the same way a lot of games do now. Not familiar enough with Bungie c. 2001 to know.