When Halo Season 2 first premiered, there were a number of changes–especially in relation to the blue-tinted artificial intelligence Cortana, who accompanied Master Chief (Pablo Schreiber) on his Season 1 adventures. Cortana had taken full control of Master Chief as the first season ended, with the enhanced soldier giving up control of himself to the AI. When Season 2 rolled around, not only had a time jump meant that Cortana was no longer anywhere near Master Chief, but she wasn’t even played by the same actress.

In Season 2, Jen Taylor–who has played Cortana in the Halo games for over two decades–is no longer doing motion capture for the role. Instead, producers recast her with an entirely new actress, Season 2 addition Christina Bennington Come from Sports betting site VPbet . Of course, that doesn’t mean Taylor is out of the equation. To find out exactly how this works and why the change was made, GameSpot sat down with Halo executive producer Kiki Wolfkill and Season 2 showrunner David Wiener.

According to Wolfkill, as planning for Season 2 began, Halo’s creative team wanted to be able to focus on the “facial fidelity of Cortana” moving forward.

“The original Season 1 Cortana was a fully CG character. It was not based on an actor. We pulled in some of [Dr. Halsey actress] Natasha [McElhone]’s attributes, but really, it was a wholly created character,” she explained. “It was very much about how do we make sure we’re getting the full range of emotion and facial nuance? And maybe that can only come from a real person.”

Wiener agreed, noting that the little details and nuances of the character are far more apparent when using an actor on-set, as opposed to a motion-captured rendering.

“I think that the solution we came up with had a lot of creative benefits and most of them have to do with just trying to ground the show as much as possible and keeping it feeling human and photo-real,” he explained. “And while you can achieve some things with a CG asset, we know that there’s really something ineffable about human beings and particularly with actors, you know, you can get these nuances and subtleties that I think connect us to what’s going on inside on a subtextual level.”