For those who did not read the forerunner trilogy I would say the Didact for more recent games, his character is not explained at all in game, and his motivation is only revealed in his epilogue at the end, he feels more like a plot device than a character.
Edit: I think the worst ever would be the generic brown/asian people from (insert modern military shooter name here).
English
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Didact's motivations are explained a number of times in the game. [quote]"If you have not even mastered these primitives then man has not attained the mantle, your ascendance may yet be prevented."[/quote] [quote]"He seeks this - the Composer. A device which will allow him to finally contain the greatest enemy ever faced by the Forerunners. You."[/quote] [quote]"The Forerunners made plans for a final, great journey. But the Didact refused to yield our Mantle of Responsibility. He would save all life in the galaxy... at a cost. In the Forerunners' quest for transcendence, the Composer had been intended to bridge the organic and digital realms - it would have made us immortal. But its results soured. The stored personalities fragmented, and our attempts to return them into biological states created only abominations. Such moral concerns faded from the Didact's attention. The Flood only assimilated living tissue. The Composer would provide the Didact his solution... and his revenge."[/quote] [quote]"The Mantle of Responsibility for the galaxy shelters all, human. But only the Forerunners are its masters."[/quote] [quote]"Humanity's imprisonment is a kindness."[/quote] And then the Epilogue. Are his motivations illustrated as well or in as much detail as they are in the novels? No, not at all, but there are still plenty of instances where the Didact's motivations are covered.
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Most of these quotes are from the Librarian AI, towards the end of the game, and they tell us stuff we already know. They basically say that he wants to kill all humans, but they don't say why he wants to do that. His motivations aren't backed up by emotion at all until the Epilogue.
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Reclaimer is just 2 missions after the Didact is awakened and the conversation occurs just over half way through the level. At no point is it said that the Didact wants to kill all humans, he believes that only the Forerunners are the holders of the Mantle and he is doing the galaxy a favor by composing them because "humanity's imprisonment is a kindness" - which, judging by humanity's actions post-Halo 3, is perfectly true. That makes it perfectly clear [i]why[/i] he wants to do it.
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If you didn't read the kilo-5 trilogy then you would not know what humanity did post Halo 3, in Halo 4 they seem perfectly innocent. "Humanity's imprisonment is a kindness." just sounds like the type of gibberish that the Reapers from Mass Effect are fond of. If you just play through the game, you might understand why he wanted to compose the Humans 100,000 years ago, but we don't see Didact enough for his motivations for wanting to compose them now to be believable. The problem lies in a lack of much needed exposition.
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While true about Kilo-5, one can get a general idea of what the Didact is talking about when he states that humanity has been seizing Forerunner triumphs for their own - this is a major focus of the story post-Halo 3 and is prominently featured in Halo 4 with the Infinity, Jul's dialogue in Spops, the Janus Key and so on. And this is why his motivations [i]are[/i] still believable 100,000 years on from his imprisonment, humanity has arisen again and is being nurtured by his wife to take the Mantle which he believes belongs only to Forerunners. Once again, I agree that the amount of exposition in the game is poor (Josh Holmes admitted this himself during the campaign talk segment of the GDC panel), but there is still enough in there for the Didact's motivations to be illustrated and made sense of.
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But not during your first play through, which is likely before Spartan Ops and the Epilogue, which in my opinion is fairly damning. I quite liked the Epilogue, but that does not make the Ur-Didact a good character on its own. The problem that arises is that the original Halo trilogy sets up the humans as special to the Forerunners, and the terminals from Halo 3 give the player a feeling that the Forerunners want to give the Humans a chance because they had done it wrong. The concept of the Didact being of the opposing opinion needs to be explained better, the Didact needs to be better portrayed as a tragic character who was forced to watch his entire species go to make their suicidal final stand and blames the humans. I guess what gets me about him was the potential for an awesome antagonist.
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You don't always have to understand everything in your first playthrough, you don't always need to have [i]everything[/i] revealed at once about a character (hell, Bungie got away with it for 5 whole games without once explaining why the Covenant want to destroy humanity in the games). This was the first time we actually saw Didact in a game and he's evidently going to be back for more in the future ("You and I are brothers in many ways... not least in that we faced the Didact before, and face him now, and perhaps ever after. This is combat eternal, enmity unslacked."), again I can only reiterate that I agree that the Didact had a shit-tonne of potential and much of that was wasted in the game because they didn't want to spoil Silentium and that [i]is[/i] highly disappointing but as the game stands it does explain his motivations enough so that they can be understood.