Forge has and always will be an "afterthought." It's simple economics. The hardcore forger fanbase are the vast MINORITY, with campaign and multiplayer fans obviously being the main focus. If anyone here thinks that would have been different with Bungie handling halo 4 they are quite disillusioned. To them, forge was and always will be a glorified map editor, and never a true map creation tool. 343 has adopted this mindset as well, and rightly so IMO. Yeah, it sucks for us forgers. But you know what? I'll take a less feature rich forge if it means the core MP/campaign/Spartan Ops experiences are fantastic. Did they cut a few corners? I absolutely won't deny that. But nobody here seems to be capable of recognizing some of the very real improvements 343 has made. Improvements that WILL lead to better maps going forward.
OOOOH! Icwutudidthar. Except when you cut corners you get an extra side. Not a rounded edge. I just had a realisation. The edges are round. YOU MIGHT BUY HALO 4 INSTEAD OF AN IPHONE! Halo 4 will be banned after apple sues and gets 1 billion dollars in damages! Only in America...
I think they will eventually take care of some things on their own. The brace large doesnt have bumps in it if you walk over it, no forge item has that (Blocks at least dont) and it looks kinda forerunner now.
I've recently launched my first website Gamersuggestions, where I want to provide a platform that bridges the gap between gamers and developers. Gamers can post suggestions (such as the forge suggestions in this thread) and the community will rank them using a like/dislike system. This way CA/343 can see in the blink of an eye which changes we want in forge. I'm working hard to get in touch with the right people so that we will have one place for all our suggestions.
Peter, I'm talking about the bumps on the non 8x2 flat area. Those ones are actually there.. and they're annoying me to death. Why add more useless polygons?...
Oh really? I guess we're ignoring the performance issues, bugs, lack of DLC support, terrain editing, proper lighting tools, useful pieces, and the list goes on. if they cared sooooo much, why are basic features missing from the toolset? Really, no undo, no copy paste? All we got was phasing and coordinate editing. Which brings me back to my last point. The forge community is comprised of less than a thousand active users (users who use the mode daily and for more than derping around). It simply isn't economically feasible to divert so many resources to a game mode that will effect so little of the PAYING fanbase. As I said 343 knows that the MP/campaign/Spartan ops crowds are the main money makers. It seems that everyone here expected them to make the entire game around forge. But that's the thing about being a minority: Your voice often goes unheard. You all wanted some kind of huge leap forward in forge. But forge is such an insignificant part of this game to 99% of the Halo community. In the wake of that fact you all ***** and moan that forge has been noobified. Did you ever stop to think that in making the mode more user friendly and widely accessible they are making financially feasible to support? I don't know about you, but that makes a whole lot of sense to me. I still think all of this is irrelevant because forge HAS undergone quite a few improvements. Everyone acts like it has been butchered, bastardized and forgotten by 343. But it hasn't. In fact, they have given you quite a lot to play around with. I seem to be repeating myself quite a lot n this thread, so I won't go into all the ways I think they've improved forge for the better again. But I will say that you are all acting like spoiled, entitled teenagers who think their rich parents should bend to their every whim. Honestly, you should be grateful forge didn't go the same route as fire fight and be canned altogether. Now THAT is something worth complaining about.
What about the contribution of forgers to variety in Matchmaking? I haven't seen anyone bring that aspect of Forging up yet..
Those were major features though compared to anything added in H4 forge. Phased physics alone revolutionized forge as far as ease of use, even though it probably didn't take that much dev time. But the bigger thing is that the entire object set was new and Forge World was a massive, somewhat diverse playground that inspired near-endless creativity. I think one thing people are taking issue with in H4 is that the core of the mode - the palette - is a virtual copy and paste from Reach. The bulk of the work seems to have gone into making three pretty (but smallish and finicky) environments. The resources, such as they are, went in a direction that is aimed at casual forgers. More on which below. You're overlooking something fairly obvious though. Forged maps made up a huge bulk of the maps in Reach's matchmaking, and many more people played customs on forged maps than actually made their own. It may be that few got into forge in any serious way, but the mode's existence and that minority you're looking down your nose at propped up the longevity and financial success of this game. Arguably, Reach's diseased, corpulent matchmaking experience would have been a catastrophic failure without the infusions of forged maps, on which Bungie and 343 relied *heavily* once it became apparent that people weren't that fond of a lot of the on-disc maps, particularly the underdeveloped on-disc forge variants (some of which were forcibly retired from matchmaking due to suckiness). 1) It's not really that hard to do both. Few people are asking for a full-fledged map editor - just a more evolved forge that can be used by both noobs and experts. Forge as it stands is inherently easy to use: move blocks and buildings around a pre-made environment. Adding extra advanced features to that basic framework doesn't cripple the mode for the beginners. And almost nothing about H4's forge is actually that much easier to use except for magnets, so honestly I don't really even agree that it's "noobified" at all. The only other major concession to beginners I can think of is the decent pre-fab object set on Impact. 2) A more advanced forge with better performance could actually generate content and revenue for them. Like I already mentioned, forged maps were heavy in Reach's matchmaking, even though most of them looked and played like a bowl of room-temperature oatmeal. A really good forge mode could save them countless dev hours making DLC, because we'd make it for them. I'll say the same thing to you that I say to everybody who does what you're doing here: you should respond to particular people if you have a problem with what they are saying. As soon as you lump everybody who thinks a little differently from you together, you trivialize their varying opinions and contribute to the overall "us vs. them" mentality that is such a drain on this community. A lot of people here are disappointed in forge but are not whining or acting particularly spoiled/entitled; by making it out that they are doing so, you're derailing a potentially fruitful conversation with petty insults and a meta-discussion about "whining" that gets us nowhere.
I've thought about that as well. But look at it this way: How many non forgers do you think actually care about what it takes to map those maps? In 343 eyes (and they wouldn't be wrong) the community will continue to pump out enough quality maps to keep their MM experience fresh. They don't to give us a level editor equivalent of the TES construction set to accomplish that goal. On a similar note, i'd like to point out that now more than ever our maps will feel at home in the MM lineup. Forge is Halo 4 is freaking gorgeous, and those with the talent will make maps that don't feel forged at all.
To me you are overlooking something important. A map is only as good as the game variants you will be playing them with. It's like winning a ferrari and it comes with no tires and rims to drive the darn thing. 343 unnecessarily removed key games types, features & important game options for no good reason. The previous games had these games and options and now they are gone. Not to mention that 343 said "The custom games will be highly customizable this time". Why did they say this? Was it a smoke screen or something? Again, the game needs patching and needs the game types and options that were removed to be put back. BTW I work hard for my money and I am not a spoiled brat like you call most of the FH community. I worked hard to get the money for the game so I can have my own opinion on the matter.
I had a lengthy post where I every one of your points, but my laptop died seconds before I hit post. I'm not going to spend another twenty minutes retyping everything, but I will respond with something. We saw an influx of user created maps in Reach for no other reason than the default ones sucking so terribly. Had Bungie done their jobs, neither they nor 343 later on, would have had to rely so heavily on what we created in forge. It's my best guess that 343 intends to actually create maps people want to play on. Kind of arrogant though, to act like the forging community is vital to the long term success of Halo 4. As I recall people still played Halo 2 all the way up until the plug got pulled on the original XBL service. Besides, just about every non forger i've spoken to disliked the forged maps in both 3 and Reach. So I don't see exactly what you mean by saying Reach MP wouldn't have lasted without forged maps in MM. IMO the key to the success of Halo 4's multiplayer lies mostly in 343's hands, and their teams ability to craft creative maps. But that's a whole other beast of a discussion, so I won't dwell on it here. I do think that you, and several others (not just in FH) are overlooking the fact that we can still create fantastic maps worthy of a place in MM. Could they have been better if forge in general had received more love? Absolutely. But so would have campaign... and Multiplayer... and spartan ops... and the UI... and the roster... and the netcode... and the everything else in the game. But 343 had priorities and at some point forgers are gonna have to except they are a part of a larger whole. And maybe stop acting like they have been disregarded completely. I'm sure there was plenty of great content from other modes that got cut to give forgers some of the cooler new elements in forge. From what I understand they worked on the new lighting system for eight months. Clearly 343 felt features such as that would make the biggest impact on forge. Maybe it's about time we start exploring reasons as to why they made certain additions, instead of jumping on them for the things they took out.
@FriedFoodStuffz: Forge may have not gotten updates, but neither did multiplayer. This isn't a good reason to support your claim that forge was an afterthought. Perhaps you have forgotten how much they advertised Forge 2.0.? They advertised it because it was a huge improvement to the previous iteration, and because they were relying on the community to produce material to give the game more longevity. 343 didn't advertise forge in any way, refused to respond to clear questions from the community, and revealed it very close to release (just like all of the other things 343 put little time into).
This is why 343 failed and will continue to fail unless they start waking up. Graphics mean dong. When I played Halo 2 & 3 years ago with my buds and a lot of members here at FH, we didn't care about graphics. We cared about fun and creative maps and game types. I remember playing Infection and VIP till the wee morning hours. I couldn't care less about "dynamic lighting". They have their priorities backwards. They forgot about what made Halo so fun. Simple multiplayer action and fun custom game variants and wide open forge spaces and pallets. You are buying right into all of their hype man and it upsets me as much as good game variants being removed for a "bigger" more rhetorical agenda. Either you get it, or you never will. Bottom line people is we need to bug 343 any way we can to get our forge and custom game community back!
Halo 4s maps will wear out quickly, just like Reach. The less maps we have, the more each map becomes repetitive. Every non-forger disliked most forge maps because they were poorly designed, not because they were forge maps. Many non-forgers tend to believe that the maps in mm are the best we can provide, but this isn't the case. But, those maps still increased the life of Reach. We CAN still produce mm quality maps (whatever that means), but some forgers have had enough of forging around the limitations. It isn't irrational or unrealistic to expect these limitations to be eliminated (or at least decreased), but this isn't the case. We have the same limitations, because it is the same system/palette. Halo 4s additions to forge are equivalent to that of a forge DLC. But DLC doesn't usually remove features. 8 claimed months spent on something that merely (potentially) improves forge maps visually, when they could have been working on things that would improve forge functionally.
You know what I mean by it, as implied in your first sentence. Reach had a smaller-than-expected group of (non-forged) maps on disc, which on average were unfavorably regarded by the general player base. BTB in particular suffered from generally terrible default maps, and the DLC by its nature wasn't available to all. Therefore they needed the fresh meat of new maps, even badly-forged ones, to keep people interested in multiplayer. Reach multiplayer was not a success, judging strictly by population numbers relative to Halo 2 and 3 (as well as their biggest competitor, CoD); they hemorrhaged players throughout Reach's lifespan at a rate that probably made Microsoft very nervous. The playlist updates and swirling cloud of new maps was a way of mitigating that, and it probably did help somewhat even though those maps were not great on the whole. As for Halo 4, I'm not saying that forge is necessarily vital to the success of the game in the long term, or that 343 has any need or obligation to include forged maps in multiplayer. What I am saying is that community resources are cheap (free, in fact) which is why so many companies try to exploit user content for all it's worth. So if 343 saw fit to give us a truly robust forge that could make maps even 75% as good (aesthetically and performance-wise) as the on-disc maps, they would be repaid greatly in an enhanced multiplayer that would free them up to spend less time and money developing their own DLC. It's an alternate model that works very well for some games (mostly PC-based) that are popular with modders and designers. Halo is flirting with being a paradise of user content - not just forge but also with built-in theater and video render, as well as encouraging machinima makers - but they won't fully commit to it yet. If anything 343 has taken a step back into their most comfortable zone: design their own content on their own dime. It is, if that's the approach they take. It's not the only path. But I suspect with the general push toward CoD-style gameplay that you're right.
I really don't want to get into the conversation but I just wanted to point out the faulty logic with this statement. If there is less maps it would make what is there less repetitive, not more so. One of the main complaints with Reach was that the "grey overload" caused there to be thousands of very similar maps without much variation. Halo 3 had a lot fewer maps and thus fewer repetition.
I fully agree with this thread, however much the conversation has strayed into arguments. I've commented on CA's youtube videos, and been posting on the waypoint forums, lets hope we can get a good map via DLC.