343 turns the other cheek: Halo 4 won't reveal Master Chief's face
Halo 4 won't reveal Master Chief's face, so if you were playing the Halo series solely for a glimpse of chiseled space soldier jawline, it might be time to throw in the towel. 343 Industries is continuing the faceless precedent set by Bungie, which refrained from showing Master Chief's visage throughout its time with the franchise.
Not that we don't know what Master Chief looks like – he's described in detail in the 2001 novel Halo: The Fall of Reach.
"The funny thing about the Chief is he's actually really well described," O'Connor tells Eurogamer. "If you went down into that line and found a nerd with a deep canon Halo t-shirt and said describe the Master Chief to this police sketch artist, that police sketch artist would then produce a perfectly accurate rendering of an older man, almost painfully pale, almost albino white, with pale blue eyes, reddish hair, close cropped to a skin head, and maybe the last remnants of freckles he had when he was a kid."
O'Connor wants to keep the mystery alive and doesn't want fans to feel alienated by an official face. "That's a device to keep the player invested in the character and keep the player from constantly being reminded that they're not a hero or that they have to be a boy or they have to be a girl, or whatever that is," O'Connor says.
Maybe it's better this way, super fans. More often than not, on-screen adaptations of book descriptions are supremely disappointing.
