We stage things like this all the time, both for public-facing gameplay videos and for internal demo videos. This is because the purpose is to showcase the gameplay systems in a timely fashion. We usually don’t have a lot of time with our audiences. No one wants to sit and wait for minutes while the next demo is carefully set up. It’s even worse if it’s a live demo and the setup breaks or something unforeseen happens and you have to reset everything to load up the demo scenario again.

For video presentations especially, it is normal for us to record several takes of the same demo scenario and then choose the best of the recordings to edit together for the final presentation. It makes sense for us to reduce the setup time it takes to prepare the scenario for the recording. It isn’t abnormal for us to create entire test maps just to prove out different gameplay items. Moving around a few things for the sake of a major presentation is normal. You should see the kind of stuff we had to cobble together for E3 demos back in the day. The stuff we’d have to do often ranged from “minimal fixing up of existing feature” to “smoke and mirrors whole features for this demo”.

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