UP: Did you ever consider giving her any moves where she uses a weapon, not in the sense where you use a gun to shoot another character, but perhaps as a melee move, to knock someone over the head with the butt of a rifle?
TI: Okay, so I'll give an example of the design process. First of all, I don't particularly enjoy a style of game development where you're concerned with one particular thing. I like to consider all possibilities and all variables going forward to give myself as much room to move as possible. Obviously I was aware of the fact that including weapons from the Halo universe would be one of the best ways to bring out the Halo-ness of the situation. But at the same time, having her use firearms and guns from the game brings with it a set of issues and problems, so pretty early on in the process I decided not to have her shoot guns in the game.
The decision to not use guns had a couple factors involved. The first thing is personally myself, if I'm in the Spartan's position, and I'm basically joining this group of people all fighting, using martial arts, using hand-to-hand, I wouldn't feel right suddenly shooting a machine gun. That's just a personal observation. If you're the person on the receiving end, you're just going to think that's cheap; it's just natural to feel that's cheap if you're unarmed and getting shot at. Another thing that people tend to forget is that in order to show the appropriate reaction to getting shot, you have to include a lot of blood effects and that's a taboo within the DOA universe that I've set. Taking that into account, it seemed the best course not to include guns. With that said, I don't give up easily, so I thought, "Why don't we just have a gun strapped to her back as a prop? When I mentioned that to Bungie, they said, "Well if you're going to do that, it's probably better to think she wouldn't have any guns in the first place in this kind of situation." As you can tell from this one example, everything has been based on a very deep dialogue with Bungie regarding all sorts of aspects, very specific aspects of the character design, and that's how things work.