There’s just something about blue video game characters, isn’t there? First, swift and unrelenting online outrage managed to convince the creative team behind “Sonic the Hedgehog” to completely overhaul the title character’s original (and creepy-looking) design. Only a few years later, some on social media attempted to get a similar movement going in order to “fix” Cortana in Paramount’s live-action “Halo” series. Those fan-driven efforts will have gone to waste this time around, but those behind the new series are at least attempting to explain why they arrived at this unexpected design change.

343 Industries’ Kiki Wolfkill spoke with GamesRadar+ to assuage fears that this decision was perhaps evidence of embarrassment about the source material. Wolfkill, accurately and amusingly enough, points out that there is no one single Cortana design in the first place, even in the games.

“It’s so funny, because we change her design for every game. And a lot of that is driven by technology. A lot of the design changes as we progress[ed] through the game generations was because we had access to better graphics, technology, more pixels, and more effects. And so it’s always been about adapting Cortana to the environment.”

“In this situation, it’s so very different from the games in that she has to feel real. And by that, I don’t mean feel like a real human. She has to feel like a real AI, a real hologram, and be a character that real people are acting against …That was really the impetus in designing her — how do we make her feel very tangible in this Halo world?”

Fans should probably brace themselves for even more changes beyond cosmetic ones, as the first two episodes certainly hint at a drastically altered origin for Cortana. But that only adds even more legitimacy to her new appearance here, in my opinion. According to original voice actor Jen Taylor (who reprises her role in the series), this will be “…a pretty different Cortana to the one we’ve met before.”

“She has different goals than the Cortana that we have known in the past 20 years. So that is really fun. I get to do some slightly different things.”

I’m curious to see how fans will react to this when the series premieres on March 24, 2022, on Paramount+.