User blog comment:Deathmanstratos/Some Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare singleplayer background information revealed/@comment-1854594-20140505052950/@comment-1055346-20140505061229

A few notes here:

1) Gordon Freeman shouldn't be given a pass, especially once Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and 2 roll around. We are supposed to be believe he is forming a bond with Alyx by saying ABSOLUTELY nothing to her throughout both games? Hell it's not like the dude even cried out during her fathers death or even trie dot comfort her. I get the illusion is that Gordon might be talking back to the other characters and the audio just isn't played for us, but come on, that's no excuse.

2) But then we get into my next point which partially contradicts my last. Sometimes it's okay for the protagonists of the games to be silent. In the first and (to a lesser extent) the second Half-Life's it worked because Gordon was in a hectic situation where he wasn't particularly able to bond with any of the characters. So rather than have him talk just to react to the scary things happening around him, Valve left him quiet so that the player could be more absorbed into the Character. In the first Bioshock and in Bioshock 2, both protagonists are silent, and for actually fair reasons. Jack is silent because he really doesn't need to talk. He's never in a situation where you would have to respond to the other person (Though thanking Tenebaum for saving your life would have been nice) and he mostly only ever receives commands over the radio that he has to follow in order to survive, or taunts from enemies that he doesn't have to respond too. In this case, the silent protagonist works and it DOES let the player feel more like the character. Subject Delta is left silent for the same reasons, but also because canonically he's a Big Daddy who can't talk regardless.

To use the same series, a silent protagonist would absolutely HAVE NOT worked in Bioshock Infinite. The impact of the story completely hinged on the character of Booker and his relationship with Elizabeth, so if he hadn't had spoken at any point in the game none of it would have been believable and the story would be far less impactful, possibly not impactful at all. And this also carries over to your Duke Nukem example. Tits aside, Duke Nukem 3d likely wouldn't have been as much of a classic as it was if it didn't introduce a wisecracking, talking protagonist in the age of the "Doomguy". It had the solid gameplay, atmosphere, and explorable world. But Duke's personality is the thing that seems to be keeping the series alive even after Forever's semi failure.

3) Mitchell talking in cutscenes isn't actually that different than the Master Chief only talking in cutscenes (though that ended with Halo 4). It allowed the story to build around this heroic super-soldier who had a personality, had goals, had wants and desires, but could also be assumed by the player and feel like an extension of the player when the time came. I'm not saying making him talk during gameplay in Halo 4 was a mistake, but him being semi-silent in the trilogy was pulled off very well on Bungies part, and managed to convey the exact character they needed to convey. From the sound of things, Mitchell seems very Master Chief like. He will be a very talkative character during cutscenes, has a rather generic backstory (I know the Expanded Universe made Chief much more detailed, but his whole backstory in the first Halo was "You're a Supersoldier and You're the last one"), and won't speak during gameplay. It COULD work but that leads me to my final point.

4. I agree, Call of Duty is no longer the place for silent protagonists, but at the same time it worked for a really long time. There was no need for the protagonists of any of the Call of Duty games between 1-6, plus MW3, to talk because they were simply a role for the player to fill and didn't need to form believable emoptional attatchments with the supporting characters or the villain for the sake of the story. Black Ops changed that, and Mason absolutely had to be a speaking character to tell the story Treyarch wanted to tell. Frost in MW3 however didn't. And Yuri was given enough characterization through cutscenes to get his job done in the finale. Plus Infinity Ward was smart enough to know that when you played as Captain Price, he was going to have to talk or it was not going to have the intended epic effect ("This is for Soap" still gives me fucking chills, say what you want about MW3's campaign, that line was absolutely epic.) Black Ops II was the same situation as Black Ops, with both Mason's needing to talk to have the intended effect.

But then we have Ghosts where we realized that the stories these games are now trying to tell absolutely require talking protagonists. Military Chatter aside, the whole point of Ghosts story was that your squad was supposed to be your family. Well how is Logan supposed to form bonds that close to any of the characters when he literally doesn't say a word throughout the entire campaign? It was a poor and lazy choice for the writers of the campaign and really ruined the dynamic they were going for.

Now I can't yet speak for Advanced Warfare's plot, but at least having Mitchell speak in cutscenes is a sign of improvement. And since Sledgehammer has also said cutscenes won't just be people talking over a projection of the map, we can hope he'll get as much characterization off-gameplay as David Mason did in Black Ops 2.

I might have to make and opinion blog out of this. End rant.