While Marcus is a better example than the rest, I really don't agree with this. These guys have faces, they emote, they have an impact on how you percieve the world around them. In the case of Marcus, he's being ordered around and is part of this larger machinery so he's more akin to the Chief in that way, but Kratos and Nathan have their own motivation and sense of purpose. Kratos and his own agenda moves the story of God of War forward. It's even ignited by his desire for revenge.

With Master Chief, you play as one - superpowered as he may be - soldier fighting this huge war. When you play as The Rookie in ODST, you're a soldier fighting the same war. They are interchangable in a different way. That said, Bungie really do capitalise on the change of perspective and sense of role by making the ODST fight a smaller battle with a more intimate relationship to it and eachother, but the result of that for me was just that I realised how much more involved I felt with these guys that feel flawed and human.

Now that the backstory of Halo is bleeding into the mainstream offerings and aren't just confined to the books and thus the ultra hardcore enthusiasts, it's not long before it dawns on people that there are more than one spartan in this universe too, and they even show their face, potentially making a more lasting impression than the chief's stoic nature has done for three games.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not questioning the iconic nature of the chief, nor am I undermining the decision to keep him anonymous by not showing his face, but come Reach, there'll be nothing about him that offers a more compelling foundation for further stories. I can't even tell you how many people think the spartan in DOA4 is Master Chief.

People just cling to what they know, I think. I think this big chunk of lore looming above them is intimidating and they just wanna get back to what they knew about Halo 1, kicking ass as this sorta bizarrely turtles-esque super marine. For me, it's almost gone the other way. The more removed I feel from the spartans, the cooler THEY get and the more at home I feel in this universe. When I played Halo Wars and they fly in spartans and you can just rip the fuck into vehicles and stuff I was like OH GOD YEAH!!! Then they were like "our work here is done, let's split".

Effectively, I think spartanssSSsss in plural are the best thing Master Chief amounts to. On his own, as a dude, he merely displays the utterly base requirements for a video game hero. But yeah, those are my two cents anyway.

Uh, they did away with Oblivion's level scaling in Fallout 3. There are areas in FO3 above your level. I guess Oblivion is a shooter too? Or a God of War hack-and-slash game? ;)

Anyway... does anyone think they'll show actual gameplay? Or are we talking cinematic?

Yeah the Halo 3 engine really does secretly look better than.. it.. looks... because of the aliasing and the AF problems. I'm finally playing it in co-op now, two years later, and it's weird how it's both still great looking and really rough looking all at once.

Any game is going to look a lot better if you apply a load of anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering.. and then color correct it in PS. That's not really the game secretly looking better so much as it is modified.

That's not what I mean though. Sometimes when you get a zoomed in view of things, put against a nice skyline in Halo 3... Like when you die and the camera kinda spins around and stuff... You kinda can't tell the aliasing is terrible and that the ground in front of you have a big ugly seam that kinda rolls out the texture as you move forward.. and the game suddenly looks really really nice.

Yea I actually have no issue with Halo 3's visuals, outside of performance. I actually wish that Reach dropped the emphasis on eye candy and just tried to improve the framerate where they're at with the current level of fidelity.

Sure yeah, I can agree with that. I'll say this much though, the animation *needs to improve*. I will honestly be disappointed if cutscenes look as horrible as Halo 3 ones currently do, where people emote like Thunderbirds. I'm a low maintenance dude in terms of graphical fancyness for sure, but conveying a great story with great, believable characters.. I just feel like a bar is set for that stuff where Halo is below the minimum for character animation. I'm not expecting it to look like Uncharted 2, because frankly I don't think anything will until Uncharted 3, but let's put it this way; I almost couldn't appreciate Nathan Fillion in ODST because he looked completely fucked up.

I'd like for that to not be the case in Reach.

Actually, speaking of 7 years ago, I've tried to replay Halos 1 and 2 on the 360 and they pretty much look and behave TERROOHBLLEEEE! I kinda wouldn't mind it if MS put out a GOW collection-esque thing with proper upscaled and made to work properly on 360 versions of the two first games. It's just kind of an awkward proposition that people are "up to speed" on a trilogy that isn't particularly enjoyable on the one viable system you can play them on these days.