There’s no reasonable explanation; no use to look for one. It’s certainly not the swearing. Bad Company was rated T and it was waaaaaaaaaaay more profane.
I remember Xalener giving an explanation in the original thread but I don’t feel like incorrectly paraphrasing it so I’ll leave it to him.
Lightsabers are very clean when it comes to dismemberment because they automatically cauterize the wounds.
^ And yet there’s that scene in A New Hope with the cantina arm chop. It’s a Kirosawa homage, sure, but there’s blood there.
Really? Huh. Honestly, I don’t remember that, I haven’t seen that movie in years.
That’s one of the things they fixed in the Star Wars fanedit ‘Revisited’. That bloody arm technically ‘never happened’ but Lucasarts was, I guess, too lazy to edit the blood out.
On top of the dismemberment argument, there was dismemberment all over the place in Force Unleashed II and that was also Rated T. I like to think it’s because back when Halo first came out there were a little bit higher standards and it’d just be wierd for every game after to be rated T, Halo Wars excluded.
[COLOR=‘Orange’]I moved the whole Starwars news out of Halo to the ladies club, TV thread.
You can now go back to discuss Master Chief’s next adventure.
Long story short, M gets the money in games like PG13 gets the money in movies.
Microsoft asked Bungie to T down Halo 1 after they were part way through implementing dismemberment to the models and all that. The ESRB found out about the flood, and their dismemberment centric combat, and they forced an M on the rating. Microsoft went “fuck it, do what you were gonna do” but it was too late and there was just time to turn the blood back on in the midst of all the other finalizing shit.
But yeah, Halo 1 was going to have legit dismemberment through and through. On Halo PC you can still find some gore’d crewmen/ marine textures. The grunt and elite materials have detailed neckholes in their texture sheets too.
I’m pretty sure they’ve kept the feature out of main releases ever since because it makes overseas sales really tricky.
As for why they’re M rated, I’m certain it’s because you can interact with corpses. The ragdolls in Halo never sleep like they do in other games, and even if they hit a resting position and “freeze” you can pop them right back out with a high caliber bullet, explosion, melee attack, or ballsack.
…I’ve been asking some higher ups in the CMT team (redundant acronym, I know) if it would be possible to “re-implement” the dismemberment feature, and so far it’s been the same old “it wasn’t there before so it won’t fit now” stuff. 
ofc it will fit. I mean come on.
I still love how the ragdolls in Halo 1 fucking spew and get it everywhere if you melee them.
I loved making my game lag from all the blood I generated by meleeing them while they were dead.
^ I knew I wasn’t the only person who did that.
If you didn’t do that, you were a fool.
THOSE WATCHER GIBS
I’m gonna love watching those “wings” roll around and tip over like a lost hubcap.
I think the most impressive thing about this game is the sound effects. Those guns sound absolutely lovely.
I was a little worried about the hand-off to 343…not worried anymore.
Looks like 343 is Microsoft’s official ‘magic’ studio that can pull off shit that just doesn’t seem possible on such old hardware.
Those watchers look a lot like Icarus from Quake 2
Yeah, I’m really amazed at the technical voodoo that went on here. I’m sure Microsoft had their 360 development and support teams working super closely with 343. First party development has its perks, as we’ve also seen in the Uncharted games.
I was thinking that actually. I’m sure there’s a little loving acknowledgement in there. There’s no way that was an accident.
Yeah, and I noticed the multiplayer flood kind of looked like a hybrid design of Doom 3/Quake 1
I’m liking these designs they are making.
Speaking of quake
how did that manage to look so bad?
I mean you could go “it’s just a grenade” but that was never Halo’s thing to skimp out on something just because it wasn’t prominent. I mean look at the frag and the plasma nades :s
maybe the forerunners had the sufficient technology to form grenades with seemingly anti-physical appearances (hence the low res texture and model)
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