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Posted by: Rolling Flame
Blame the fanbase for that one. A lot of people didn't like Arbiter missions in Halo 2, most probably because the majority of them involved the Flood.
It was also introduced horribly. Halo 2 was billed as the Master Chief's big, epic fight for Earth, but instead we just got a decent but only semi-finished-ish (all that blank grey? lol) section in New Mombasa. And just as something REALLY INTERESTING was happening, we got shot over to this gas mine which was kind of hard to care about at that particular moment in the story, and which quickly became even harder to care about thanks to the dryness of the combat in that section of the game.
The Arbiter's introduction may be interesting from a universe-building standpoint to some people after the fact, but a lot of us still see it as clunky and painfully executed on a story flow and gameplay level, even if the cutscenes were admitedly well-made. My favorite part of Halo 2 on my first playthrough was when I saw In Amder Clad pop out of slipspace, if only because Oracle was finally over.
This having been said, I still think it's horrible that Bungie reverted to chief-only. By the end of Halo 2, they had a system going that probably would have been nicer to maintain. And almost anything would have been smoother than having the Arbiter constantly shoehorned into Chief's vicinity for no apparant reason.