Quote Originally Posted by ejburke View Post
If he's not the same Gravemind, then it begs the question where he came from. Where did the Flood find enough food on Delta Halo, post Halopocalypse, to generate a new one? The humans and Covenant had only just arrived during the events of Halo 2.
It's possible the Gravemind came from somewhere else after finding out about the flood forerunner war, the flood were afterall extragalactic.

Bungie pretty clearly led the player to believe that he was a remnant of the war with the Forerunner. Given Cortana's line in Halo 1, "Halo doesn't kill the Flood, it kills their food." -- it made perfect sense that he would have survived. Then Halo 3 has to come in and confuse everyone by demonstrating that Halo does indeed kill the Flood.
The flood infect hosts, the halo's would kill the host's but not the infection spores themselves leaving the infection stuck in a dead host, much like Ebola, that virus kills its host so fast it cannot spread itself and yet it is possibly the most deadly virus on earth.

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Oh and kornman, Joe said in the halo 2 LE at one point they felt like they had gotten back from E3 2003 with less than they had originaly hoped and that it required alot of rethinking.
There's an awful lot of differences in terms of the engine and not just because it was beta stage.
Im asuming you would know more on this though as last i heard, you had access to a copy of the beta which had the ATV.