User blog comment:Cubuff37/My Official Review Of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare/@comment-1263839-20150131213136/@comment-3967954-20150203221209

@Cubuff - The decision to cast Kevin Spacey as Irons most likely did have an impact on his character - characterization is achieved through dialogue and cutscenes, and motion capture/voice acting sessions with Spacey would've cost a fortune. The game was on a limited budget with a tight deadline; any attempts to squeeze in more dialogue and cutscenes probably would've pushed the game overbudget. Maybe they did have more lines of dialogue lined up but ran out of time. Call it an excuse all you want, that's how game development goes down.

Irons' motives were more interesting because, whereas Makarov's intentions were basically to blow up America because "hurr durr I hate the west", Irons had a reason to hate the US Government. They got his son, and many of his employees, killed in pointless wars that never solved anything. Again, I don't think his character was executed all that well, but it was still more ambitious than generic stock Russian villain. IW never actually bothered to explain why Makarov hated the west (other than because he looked up to Zakhaev, but even then they don't really explain why he hated the west).

Also, I didn't actually say that you said that IW writes deep narratives.

Regarding Gideon, it's all there in the game. He literally does defect on moral grounds. COAZ's description may have sounded a bit overdramatic but it's essentially the truth. One of the only interesting parts of the narrative.

And regarding polls, they don't prove anything. If there were a poll of the CoD community's favourite CoD character ever, Ghost would probably take first place, and you can't tell me with a straight face that he was a compelling and well-written character. Ghost's appeal is the accent and the mask, Soap's is the accent and the mohawk and Price's is the accent and the moustache. Also, there's the fact that Soap and Price are recurring characters who've starred in 3 games; AW's cast have only starred in one. It's a lot harder to become attached to a character who's only starred in 1 game than a character who's starred in 3.