I haven't found the interview that might or might not have existed, but here's what Mr Laidlaw and others have to say about it:
‘I forwarded this to the Portal 2 team as I have no insight into the development of that bit. However we have done some fairly rigidly sequences, where the only real constraint was the one of sticking to first-person viewpoint. The opening of HL2Ep1 seems to break even that (although there's some rigamarole to justify how it's not actually broken...vortigaunts are handy in this regard).’
‘I got the following response to your question:
Left4Dead and Left4Dead2 both had opening video sequences so I don’t think we have the pattern he is describing.
To answer his question:
At the time we didn’t have the Level Designer resources to do the ending in the engine. As it was we almost had to cut several of the sequences in other parts of the game. Luckily we ended up with something that was higher quality than an in-game sequence would have been.’
‘And now I have further information that is more specific:
The whole end sequence being prerendered was a continuity/memory usage thing. Especially on consoles we couldn’t afford the memory to have it end and be continuous, so rather than have a jarring load for the end, it streamed video (which we can do without a load). Having a level load in the ending sequence would have been weird.
So there you go. A very good question, and one that we probably would have put into the commentary if we’d known it would be of interest.’
‘I have one more snippet for you, since you brought up Portal 1:
Another fun fact... we had the opposite solution to the same problem. We originally intended to do a prerendered cutscene for Portal 1's ending, but when we ran short on time had to do it in-engine.
These comments come from several people who worked on the game. [...]
There was never any deliberate attempt to apply a single standard across our singleplayer games, so it’s not surprising to see inconsistency. The most I personally had hoped for was to be consistent within the HL narrative; I would not wish those constraints on any other series. Every game presents its own set of challenges, and the last thing you want to worry about when you’re starting out is being constrained by the desperate, last-minute solution some other team came up with at the very end of a completely different project.’
‘I forwarded this to the Portal 2 team as I have no insight into the development of that bit. However we have done some fairly rigidly sequences, where the only real constraint was the one of sticking to first-person viewpoint. The opening of HL2Ep1 seems to break even that (although there's some rigamarole to justify how it's not actually broken...vortigaunts are handy in this regard).’
‘I got the following response to your question:
Left4Dead and Left4Dead2 both had opening video sequences so I don’t think we have the pattern he is describing.
To answer his question:
At the time we didn’t have the Level Designer resources to do the ending in the engine. As it was we almost had to cut several of the sequences in other parts of the game. Luckily we ended up with something that was higher quality than an in-game sequence would have been.’
‘And now I have further information that is more specific:
The whole end sequence being prerendered was a continuity/memory usage thing. Especially on consoles we couldn’t afford the memory to have it end and be continuous, so rather than have a jarring load for the end, it streamed video (which we can do without a load). Having a level load in the ending sequence would have been weird.
So there you go. A very good question, and one that we probably would have put into the commentary if we’d known it would be of interest.’
‘I have one more snippet for you, since you brought up Portal 1:
Another fun fact... we had the opposite solution to the same problem. We originally intended to do a prerendered cutscene for Portal 1's ending, but when we ran short on time had to do it in-engine.
These comments come from several people who worked on the game. [...]
There was never any deliberate attempt to apply a single standard across our singleplayer games, so it’s not surprising to see inconsistency. The most I personally had hoped for was to be consistent within the HL narrative; I would not wish those constraints on any other series. Every game presents its own set of challenges, and the last thing you want to worry about when you’re starting out is being constrained by the desperate, last-minute solution some other team came up with at the very end of a completely different project.’
