When I had first heard that Halo 4 was coming out, I was very, very excited. I couldn't wait for the new campaign, and the online had me excited, but I was absolutely ecstatic for Forge mode. I wanted to know what 343i would do with Forge! I thought they might be able to do some cool stuff with Forge! It seems I was wrong. There are many, many problems with Forge now. It's broken. When saving and loading a map, the pieces become misaligned by a few degrees, and sometimes even a coordinate. The removal of Precise editing is absolutely ridiculous, and the lack of an ability to zoom in while in Monitor mode just makes it worse. 90% of the items are copied from Reach, badly. The few items that 343i actually added to the game are terrible to use. All of the items have way too many details. The maps are way too small, and none of them have any extremely good areas on them whatsoever. Let me start with the broken saving/loading. If you Forge, you've probably already noticed that, when you load a map, it looks slightly weird. You probably found out that the pieces all are either off a few degrees, or are moved a coordinate or two. Now, I know that this doesn't sound very bad, but let me explain. When you've got a very large object, say, the Wall Coliseum, if it goes off by just one degree, it doesn't seem like much, but it moves a very large amount at the ends. Not only that, but it makes the map look slightly off if it's not fixed. But it's just a degree or so, I can just fix it, right? Well, yes. The problem gets very bad when you end up having somewhere around 200+ objects on the map, and about 80% of them do this, whether you lock them or not. When you have to fix around 160 objects, this process becomes a GIGANTIC waste of time. Another waste of time is trying to align objects in the correct place when there are no magnets on the object at the right place, and it's off the coordinate grid. In Halo: Reach, this was easily fixed. You could just hold down the left thumbstick, and you would enter precise editing mode, where the object would move extremely slowly, and this would allow for very, well, precise editing. This feature has been removed. Completely. There is nothing to replace what many Forgers considered one of the absolute best additions to Halo: Reach's Forge mode. Speaking of additions to Reach, why don't we talk about the lack of zoom in Monitor mode? Well, this mostly went along with precise editing, but could still be useful. If we had it. Zoom was mainly used when precise editing within Forge, but could also be used when editing the location or angle of a large object to a specific degree or coordinate. This feature is now gone, and makes it that much more difficult to edit quickly. I was very disappointed to see this feature removed. Guess what wasn't removed! Most of the items from Reach. In fact, they were barely even touched, other than re-textures. There are a few items missing in different maps, though. 343i should have had the ingenuity to create more than just 15 or 20 new items for each of the Forge maps. They shouldn't have even had to include the items from Reach. Now, don't get me wrong here. Some of the items from Reach were very, very good, and definitely should be back. Specifically, the items from the "Blocks" section of "Structure" items. They were great. Those items were great. Were. They are not anymore. Most of them, at least. In my own opinion, some of the most useful items in the game were the "Flat" items within the "Blocks" section of the Forge Items "Structure" Menu. These, 343i has decided, should now have part of it missing on the side. You may have noticed it. It's nothing major affecting the object, but if you have two of these objects in series, facing the same direction, then you will have a hole in what was often used as a wall. This is a gigantic annoyance, as many maps require the player to be unable to see outside the map. This hole allows them to. It may also allow the player to see to, and shoot at, parts of the map that the creator doesn't want them to. This is completely unwanted. Also unwanted are most of the items with which 343i have provided us. I'm not saying they're terrible, but they suck. Most of the items they gave us that they added to the game (in terms of "Structure" items) are terrible. I say this because the objects only mix well with other objects 343i have made. They just don't work well at all with the objects imported from Reach. The best example would be those in the map "Impact". The objects they created for this map just don't mix with the other objects they got from Reach. None of them are even remotely close to the same size as any of the other objects. Along with this comes the detailing. When you phase two objects together, the details always mix. This was very good in Halo 3 with Ghost Merging (Which is what eventually went on to become Phasing in Halo: Reach) because the objects lacked details. The reason this was good was that, because of the lack of details in objects, they would actually look nice when phased. When Reach hit, many Forgers were annoyed because the objects would almost always look terrible when phased together. Many Forgers wanted the objects to become less detailed. Instead of doing this, 343i has actually made objects more detailed. This only makes it more difficult to make maps actually look good. If a Forger becomes determined to make a map that looks good and plays well, it will take them hours longer, and probably still not look all too great. And onto the Maps. The maps are much too small. Frankly, in my own opinion, I believed Forge World in Halo: Reach was too small, but that's because of how much of it was inaccessible due to water, death barriers, etc. Now the maps have even less land and space in them. For the little space the maps actually have, only one of the maps has any good area for Forge whatsoever. That map happens to be Erosion. The only part of the map that is actually good for Forging is in the very large sized building, and that happens to feel weird due to the positions of the doors and the area inside of it that is back, and higher than the rest. Of course, this is only my opinion. So, in conclusion, Forge mode is broken. When saving and loading a map, the pieces become misaligned by a few degrees, and sometimes even a coordinate. The removal of Precise editing is absolutely ridiculous, and the lack of an ability to zoom in while in Monitor mode just makes it worse. 90% of the items are copied from Reach, badly. The few items that 343i actually added to the game are terrible to use. All of the items have way too many details. The maps are way too small, and none of them have any extremely good areas on them whatsoever. ____________________________ TL;DR Version: Forge mode has been broken. Here's the reasons: *When saving and loading a map, the pieces become misaligned by a few degrees, and sometimes even a coordinate. *The removal of Precise editing is absolutely ridiculous, and the lack of an ability to zoom in while in Monitor mode just makes it worse. *90% of the items are copied from Reach, badly. *The few items that 343i actually added to the game are terrible to use. *All of the items have way too many details. *The maps are way too small, and none of them have any extremely good areas on them These are all my own opinions! Feel free to share yours!
Just an FYI, 343i did not make the forge for Halo 4, Certain Affinity did, which is where about 80% of the issues come from. The other 20% are oversights and lack of refinement.
That, I did not know. I was aware that Certain Affinity worked on Multiplayer, but I didn't know that they worked on Forge instead of 343i. I should probably correct that then. [br][/br]Edited by merge: Still, in my opinion, 343i should have had some type of quality control with everything Certain Affinity was doing. To me at least, this just places the blame on both companies.
Not to mention a couple of glitches here and there with the forge pieces, to me the most annoying one is the one that affects the large jersey barrier, half of it becomes black for no apparent reason, that goes for all the leg jersey barriers I've laid down on my map. And I dislike the fact that you can't lay down simple weapons on the map for flood and make them show up without putting a giant marker over them, I miss the way people were forced to scavenge weapons in Reach, it looks waaaaaaaay more natural. And wut about the mega collies they promised?
There's no reason for another thread on this. Your complaints are valid, but there have been a bunch of threads on all of them, sometimes all compiled in one place. Also, I wish the entire gaming community would retire the word "broken." Forge isn't broken. It's regressively designed; it took two steps backward for every one forward; it certainly could be a ****-ton better. But it does basically work. A "broken" forge would be incapable of making maps you can play on.
I think they'll add precision editing back in, MAYBE zoom, but everyone is working on Halo 5 and the new Xbox 720. I think we will see both of these at E3 2013. With the new processing power of the Xbox 720 I think we may start to see some scripting objects in Halo Forge mode. (IE: Elevators, Switch, Doors, etc...) Bigger Budget, and a HUGE Forging Map. (bigger than Forge World)
Thank you, I thought I was the only one who had this opinion, Also that even if it was easy forge them together the most amazingly detailed walls will become dull and annoying after 500billion skybox maps using those pieces. (that's if fileshare ever gets up and running to experience other people forged maps easily to get bored of the fancy walls) Other wise agreed on everything.
you're right that many things in FOrge could be a lot better and there are glitches. the slight change to piece position was exactly the same issue Reach had, though, from experts I've read here. it involves the moving of pieces when they are not aligned to exact coordinate intervals. I have only seen this in a very limited way in Reach or Halo 4 actually. My son in Reach ( who is 9) would make a level and not use the coordinate system. He'd just visually try to line things up, this in a time before the existence of Magnets, of course. Those pieces would shift. And aligning new pieces to them made one have to use a funky process to get all the pieces to agree. In other words, he lined up items to his asthetic eye's preference rather than up, down, left and right, they'd be diagonal, and not on a precise number. Those would shift. The pieces I added and designed to agree with teh coord system did not shift. I read about colleseum walls shifting in Reach too. I made a level where most of a base area was constructed with the floor being these walls. They never shifted once I reloaded the level for the first time. So they shifted exactly once. You merely select the piece and choose "edit coordinates" and it shifts it back into teh precise location. Click "Save" and they probably won't move again. I'm not attempting to belittle your thinking here, but are the pieces that are moving merely pieces that are not aligned to the 10ths place in the coordiate system? For instance, 1.1 or 1.2, but somewhere in between like 1.123? People have said that the text file gets read when loaded and rounds to the nearest thousandth, or hundredth or something like that. EDIT: to add that if you are placing a piece and not editing its coordinates, and then use magnets to link other things to it, you may be asking for trouble in this area... FYI. Make your first piece align to coordinates and then use magnets. And if magnets are not aligning things perfectly, which often times they do not, don't use the feature. My 2 cents.
What a silly thing to say. If only one person posted on any given topic, how would these issues get any attention? 343i would have no way of knowing how many people are affected and would not make any improvements for the next game/update.
Yes, but everybody and their uncle has posted a thread saying exactly the same thing. I also highly doubt 343i are going to see this post.
"Broken" means un-useable or un-playable. Gears of War 1 and 2 multiplayer were broken. Forge is not.
I really don't have much problems with forge. I never really used precision editing, I just used coordinates all the time in Reach. And the maps may be small, but yeah, they work for me. And I really don't have problems with how the objects look, they look fine to me. Only things they could add in is a Forge World and precision editing. It really depends who you are to say that it's "broken" or not. Some things could be fixed, but nothing too crucial for me.
has anyone else noticed it? when you go in the menu to edit coordinates, it usually shifts the piece you are holding by 0.1...
That is nothing new it has done that since Halo: Reach. The only major issue with Forge is how you cannot precisely move pieces vertically up or down, all you have is co-ordinates for that. RB and LB are even worse. I couldn't do something as simple as get the Dominion Wires 1-3 laying flat on the ground because of this. So all it really needs is the precision editing put back in...and it's always nice to have more forge maps like Forgeworld or smaller in the future with more palette options to give forge maps more variety. Even if they never add those two things, a good forger can work with what we have now.
The rotation issue doesn't happen when the map is saved. It happens when someone joins your forge and steals host. Forge has always rounded off object positions when saved, for example if the height of your piece is 7.324246433454444444 then when saved it will round off to 7.33. This is nothing new every Halo Forge has done this. In Halo 4 Forge, when someone joins your forge and steals host, every object will rotate 1 degree back or forward. This was present in Reach too, but it wasn't as progressive. In Reach objects would rotate 0.1 degrees on the yaw when someone stole host. Considering that's a tenth of what happens in Halo 4, it wasn't noticeable. Yes this is a needless time consuming thing to correct, but the solution is by using a preventative measure. Either instate a personal rule to always forge by yourself, or if you are Forging with someone, make the person that usually steals host the party leader and get them to save the map. This rotation thing doesn't happen in a custom game, because you aren't editing the map. So if you want to show someone what you've been up to, either save the map and get them to download it, or chuck a few spawn points in and go into a custom. It really isn't all that much hassle to do these workarounds.