I tried watching Nightfall and it was horrible. So that didn't help. I'm just saying that there's nothing so far that makes Locke a compelling or interesting character, so I don't see the incentive of playing as him.
Is he? I recall Bungie talking about how they viewed the Arbiter as a mistake in hindsight.
As for the second half of my post, I wasn't a fan of playing as the Arbiter. Although, I do think some of the missions were better than they got credit for. I was just saying while watching Community that were a lot of lines that would have easily been interchangeable with Halo dialogue since he was talking about sci-fi universes or would have been otherwise humorous.
I was never a fan of the Covenant speaking English or them being overly humanized to begin with, though. I felt like it ruined the sense of mystery and danger surrounding the Covenant. It would be like seeing Predators or Aliens siting down and talking about lunch.
Nah. I played about four hours of the beta and it was already feeling too repetitive/grindy for me.
I think there's a time and place for it - completely mindless "horde" enemies that are always overthrowing empires through sheer numbers and dumb muscle always take me out of media. I mean, if you're operating spacecraft and wipe out most of humanity over the course of 30 years, there's probably
some level of intelligence at play. I liked Halo 2 putting it on display because it started laying the groundwork for as to
why the Covenant is hell-bent on eradicating humanity: a misunderstanding, precarious circumstance and a single lie snowballed into one of the most violent conflicts in the galaxy. Granted, the Prophets may believe differently, but there wasn't some grand prophecy at play throwing eternal champions at one another - it was just the escalation of a myriad of "human" error, and I can totally believe that. The H2A terminals also do a lot in terms of illustrating the political and theistic chokehold the Prophets had on the Elites - casting self-aware "nonbelievers" into their doom by donning the mantle of Arbiter and whatnot, which is plainly deconstructed by 343GS and goes farther to compound Sesa 'Refumee (Heretic Leader)'s tragedy.
There was some semblance of a greater undercurrent way of thinking in CE, but in the end you were still shooting "mindless" (albeit cunning) enemies.
I actually wish certain franchises, particularly Metroid and its in-game depiction of Ridley, would capitalize on the suggested intelligence of enemies more and show rather than tell. The only real sign that Ridley's more than a mindless space dragon in the games are stealing the baby Metroid in Super and him "running" a ship in Zero Mission.
I also like that the Flood are actually pursuing knowledge more than they are numbers - if they were just mindless Stage I space zombies all the time, I'd definitely get tired of them, but there are actual motives at play, particularly that they're actually making use of everything they consume instead of just bolstering their body count.