: How can I "become legend" in Destiny when it seems like nothing I
: do with my Guardian matters when you give me no hint of making them my own
: beyond a cool hairdo? The same goes for Halo even in its infancy. I can't
: make the Master Chief my own. I know that's someone else completely, an
: individual in their own right. He's a guy, I'm not. He doesn't talk a lot,
: I certainly do. He was raised from childhood to be a supersoldier, I'm
: not. I don't want to pretend I'm him because I want to see who he really
: is.

: It's not like Bungie didn't afford the Master Chief any real ability to serve
: as a blank slate "vessel" to begin with. Even with the few words
: he says, relying instead on his actions and intentions to convey his
: feelings, that says a lot about who this character is. Plus there were so
: many subtle world building moments in the first game from Cortana and
: Captain Keyes to even Guilty Spark that made the Chief someone with an
: explicitly detailed past. I just don't think you can do all that and then
: say that this person is someone you can simply inhabit to express
: yourself.

I have to wonder how many of those details that make the Chief a Character, and not just a faceless machine, are down to those Microsoft writers? Trautmann claimed he, Brannon Boren and Matt Soell wrote approximately 80% of the in-game dialogue spoken, sometimes based on outdated information (see the "natural formation" quote). The Chief's doesn't speak in-game until Halo 4, but the way people around him react is still telling about a lot of things. Even the cutscene dialogue conveys the sense of a stoic, no-nonsense but far from automaton-like veteran. And that moment with the grenade on The Maw is the first time we see him make a joke, albeit a visual one. Is this a case of MS trying desperately to create a character that will stand out, and Bungie stubbornly insisting that lack of character is a feature not a flaw? Or is that just how it comes across, after the Trautmann interview?

Honestly, I'm GLAD that 343i is emphasising the Chief as a distinct character in their media. I've seen how some people interpret the guy in their fanfiction, without knowing anything about the expanded universe - "Joe Chief" springs to mind. The gung-ho jackass with a gun that a lot of wish-fulfillment self-insert stories tend to sadly fall into. Halo is set apart from current contemporaries in that its protagonist isn't just a generic faceless soldier - CoD springs to mind. I can't remember the name of a single player-character in that entire franchise. But the Chief is iconic.

There's also the argument to be made that a character doesn't need to be LITERALLY ME for my to empathise, to care about their struggles and actions, or to imagine what I would do in their place.