Forge still isn't as good as it should be

Forge started out in Halo 3 as a simple object manipulator for tweaking spawns and weapon placement. Level editing wasn't even on Bungie's mind until the community started to make things out of crates and spawnpoints. Once they gave us Foundry and Ghost merging was discovered, the rest is - as they say - history.

Yet history has also shown fierce competition, and after nearly 10 years, Forge - while a unique element of Halo and the console space - is still behind the curve. But let's first look back at how far Forge has come:

Here's what we got in Reach compared to Halo 3:

• Object physics. This was the logical and first big change to Forge, as it made interlocking objects a feature instead of a hack, and it was instantly more accessible for it.
• Larger canvases. Forge World was a tremendous feat at the time and allowed people to build larger maps anywhere to their hearts content, including underwater.
• Increased budget. While objects still costed "money", having more of them was good step up.
• Object coloring. This allowed people to color code their maps with ease
• Rocks. For the first time, players were able to add rocks to their maps.
• Safe zones and kill zones for player containment.

By all counts, Reach was a booming community with many Forgers finding success and many incredible designs being created. I personally had a lot of fun building maps and playing them in customs.

Here's what we got in Halo 4 compared to Reach:

• Dynamic Lighting. The first noticeable change is that Halo 4 bakes light from the world to cast shadows onto objects. While it is not truly dynamic in the sense that some objects didn't render shadows in real time, it was still a big change for the look of Forge.
  • One thing I want to add here is the way grass was rendered on Ravine's rocks. This was a very advanced shading technique that we haven't seen since.
• Magnets, duplicating and locking. All of these contributed to a more efficient workflow for Halo 4's Forge.
• Trait Zones. These allowed players to apply different attributes to sections of their maps, creating shield degrading acid pits, health recharge stations, zero G space zones, and many more. Unfortunately, they haven't appeared since.
• Objective objects. I'm going to list these separately because Halo 4 was the only game where objective specific pieces such as Extraction cylinders and Dominion turrets were used as objects.
• Increased budget, although objects once again still costed "money"
• 3 distinct canvases and eventually a large one with water
• Trees. Yes, Forge Island gave us trees and suddenly everyone had them on their maps.

While Halo 4 felt like a downgrade from Reach in some ways, it accelerated far enough head that map design started to feel a bit more serious, especially when it came to creating themes.

Here's what we got in Halo 2 Anniversary compared to Halo 4:

• Scripting. At the time, this was arguably the biggest addition to Forge since the change in physics. This allowed players to create simple commands such as opening doors with buttons; however, it was still a primitive feature
• Budget changed to Objects. This was another big change, removing an object's cost and introducing a performance meter tied to a universal object count instead (which barely worked).
• Uniform texture. One of the biggest complaints about Halo 4's Forge were its messy textures, so H2A forge featured concrete and metal textures across the majority of its pieces.
• Blank Canvases. Skyward, Awash and Nebula were all completely empty, and therefore the Forge community didn't have to worry about preloaded terrain. However, in the case of Nebula, the pieces and rocks no longer fit the space theme.
• Terrain pieces. Since all of the canvases were blank, H2A let people place some basic terrain pieces on their maps.

I personally think H2A's Forge was behind Halo 4 in terms of visual identity and objects, and more importantly, the fact that it was near impossible to share maps and join games.

Now here's the doozy, Halo 5. This game is obviously the biggest jump - moreso than everything before it combined.

• Groups, Welding and Prefabs. This is the biggest change to workflow and it has completely redefined the way people build maps, especially with the addition of the content browser, allowing people to share their groups.
• A massive budget increase, including separate budgets for different effects.
• Weather effects and fog. Yes, there was a time where adding rain and snow to maps was a myth and making something atmospheric was unheard of.
• Time of Day. Whoa, you can have a map be bright and sunny one minute and dark and moody the next!
• Reference colors and dozens of them. I don't know about you, but this is another massive change to workflow that allows the Forger to have more control over micro details.
• Simple objects and flat colors. For the most part, we no longer need to worry about objects that are noisy or hard to color.
• Textures and Overlays. I don't need to say how much better maps look now that we can actually change what texture is on them.
• Enhanced scripting. You can do a ridiculous amount of stuff with scripting now and the interface is much simpler than H2A. From scripting brains controlling massive amounts of scripts to individual object commands, we can make entire maps move or even create our own gametypes.
  • And let's not forget swinging objects with joints
• A robust natural palette. We have better terrain pieces, more variety in rock texture and shapes, and way more foliage and vegetation.
• FX and Sounds. These allow Forgers to populate their levels with ambiance and visual cues ranging from waterfalls and smoke to holograms and humming sounds along with them.
• Point Lighting. This let's players set dress maps in ways they never could before and it is still a tremendously underutilized and misunderstood component of the editor.
  • Chromaboxing and Cubemapping tie into this, as they are also underused techniques to manipulating the lighting.
• Different controls. While clawing with a controller isn't as comfortable as the original scheme, the new controls are way more efficient such that it's almost impossible to go back to the previous editors.
• Ridiculously large object palette. There are thousands of objects, props, FX, Sounds, and other things to ensure that no two maps ever look or feel the same, unlike every Forge prior.
  • Let's not forget invisible blockers that allow us to restrict players from going players or create our own objects and add collision.
  • Shout out to decals, emissives, and joints, which allow us to create writing and other sorts of signage on maps.
• Custom Photos. This was a long request feature and it finally made it's way into the game. There's nothing like loading up a map and seeing your thumbnail in the background.
• REQ Weapons. I'm including this glitch because it's kinda funny that we can sort of create our own weapons now.
• A wide variety of canvases. We have many different locations that allow for vastly different styles of maps.
• The ability to choose between running around quickly or baking lights, which is a little change that goes a long way.
• File Recovery. This is another little feature that helps with the fact that Forge is always online now.
• Forge on PC. I'm not going to spend too much time on this since the PC community for the game is virtually nonexistent. However, the fact that you can use the editor on a PC (if you can run it to begin with), is a pretty big deal.

Because of the improvements in Halo 5, Forge has skyrocketed to new heights. Themes have sprung up from all styles and we've seen designers who didn't Forge much before produce stunning artistic works. Forge became far more powerful, but also far less accessible to people who simply wanted to create and play on a level. The bar was raised, and not everyone was willing or able to jump up and grab it.

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But let me rewind a bit and refer to the title of this thread. Despite all of these enhancements that make looking back on how far we've come feel all warm and fuzzy, Forge still isn't as good as it should be.

In fact, Forge actually ****ing sucks. We're at that weird fork in the road where it's powerful enough to do all of this, and yet not powerful enough, and it's most likely due to the original Xbox One's weak components.

• We can't Forge offline, so if your connection sucks or drops out, you're ****ed.
• We can't change the location or angle of the global sun, so that map that needs lighting to hit at a certain angle may need to be grouped and rotated.
• We don't have any control over skyboxes.
• The original canvases Glacier and Alpine, which arguably have the best lighting, have preloaded terrain, which makes them frustrating to work with.
• We can't create shadows with lights.
• 60% of the filters are unusable.
• Certain themes are still inaccessible. There are entire catalogs of rock sediments that we cannot replicate, snow isn't convincing, and autumnal themes are virtually impossible to create due to the lack of reddish-orange grass or foliage.
• There isn't even that much variety in foliage to begin with, and a good portion of them are "unusable"
• There's still no undo feature.
• Trait Zones disappeared, so things like acid pits are no longer possible.
• Grouping several dozen objects is laggy and causes them to shift or explode.
• We can't create spheres or conical shapes without using dozens of objects.
• There are no chiseled or shaled rocks, so making stonework or caves is incredible difficult.
• There is no feature to "rasterize" or compile maps to discard unwanted polygons and optimize performance, so framerate drops are still a tremendous hurdle to overcome.
• Accounting for performance, the object limit is actually not as high as it seems. It's actually around 1100 before framerate drops starts to show up.
• Textures cannot be scaled, and the stone texture happens to look rather stupid with how small it is
• It's impossible to script shield or health related pickups.
• We're not able to create any sort of liquid body effect without using a bunch of clever tricks, and it's still not very convincing.
• Pieces cannot be scaled, so if you need a certain size and the object isn't around - like with the simple primitives - you have to use way more objects than necessary. This is especially frustrating with ring sizes.
• 343 wasted all of Forge's remaining memory on plasma beams instead of substantial objects.
• There are nearly a dozen major Forge bugs that will most likely never be patched
• Perhaps most important, the developers are incredibly slow to implement Forge content into matchmaking

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While Forge has come a long way that makes it nice to appreciate as its own thing, the fact that it still wants to be an object editor makes it so far behind every other map design tool that it risks forever being outdated. Yea we can do all these cool stuff, but the only reason we're doing all these cool stuff is because you can play them in Halo and it's "easy".

But a map is only as good as the game it's in, and Halo is unfortunately losing its status as a game worth designing maps for due to its inflexible gameplay and lack of core gametypes. I mean, the fact that we don't have any one sided objective modes says it all. If Halo 6 doesn't take full advantage of the Scorpio's enhanced processing, it'll be hard to take Forge seriously going forward, especially as its ease of use goes down.

These may seem like nitpicks to the uninitiated, but look at it this way - Forge is marketed to a very small crowd. The people who use it religiously and push it to its potential are the people more likely to move onto professional tools that aren't shackled by weak technology and primitive designs (no pun intended). In their wake, you're left with casuals who have no idea how to use the advanced features anyway.

Is Forge doomed to be an "object manipulator" forever to account for weak tech and appeal to its casual fanbase, or will Halo 6 finally stop **** teasing and bring out the big guns?

 

Don't care the whole thread is just a set up to **** on Forge.

 

A customer is entitled to a working product and Forge has glitches that at bare minimum should have been acknowledged. 343 is a company that can't manage anything right and this thread clearly highlights several of their numerous mistakes.