So I am starting to realize that with the way 343 has created the default game types in combination with the new personal loadout setup, that Halo 4 has new considerations when it comes to map layouts and gameplay styles. Essentially, now with Halo 4 you can just create a weaponless map and people can play on it with their own loadouts and personally earned ordnance drops. Designing maps with this in mind can be good or bad. This can be good in that you do not have to concern yourself with weapon placement and can just focus on the architecture of the map. This however can be bad because you lose the ability to control map flow using weapon locations, power weapons, AA, etc. Allow me to give you an example of some issues I have already run into. I remade a fairly successful map that I previously created in Reach. Part of what controlled the flow of the map was the placement of a central power weapon and the inability to use jet pack during CTF to get to certain areas too easily (if you recall, jetpack is not available by default for many objective games in Reach). Since personal loadouts are now on by default, only some of us had jet packs and it totally skewed the game play. Our team won easily because we could get to places more quickly to score while the other team without jetpacks could do little to stop us. Also no one seemed to care to get to the middle anymore because there is no power weapon to race to. The same symmetrical map which was well balanced and interesting in Reach now feels kind of bland and unbalanced depending on the loadouts of the players. I bring all of this up because I am now kind of perplexed on the direction my map making should go. Halo 4 is not Reach, and if I don't change the way I think about making my maps then they may not play well in Halo 4. I know I could make a map in the old style, placing all the weapons on the map and creating a custom game type without player loadouts, but isn't this kinda staying in the past? Will people in the community want to play on maps that you can't just download and play with the default settings of Halo 4? Will the maps lose their universal appeal because you have to make so many custom changes to the game type? Is "Reach style" map making going to be a separate category of forging in Halo 4? Are most of us just going to abandon the old way of thinking and embrace Halo 4's style of play now in the maps we make and never look back? I wanted to know from the community how are you going to approach your map making style now? How will you address in your maps these fundamental game play differences between the way these two games play?
one thing to keep in mind about weapons is ordinance drops. even though wargames maps (is that what we should call them?) don't have weapons placed directly, they have ordinance drops to take that place. in addition, it's possible to design some maps for different purposes. some maps (like solace IMO) play much better in slayer pro (where loadouts are already set, no AAs, etc) than in infinity slayer.
Actually, most (if not all) maps on disc still use "Initial Weapon Spawns" and "Random Weapon Spawns". This way, you can still have that rush for the heavy ordinance. Initial weapon spawns function exactly as weapons have in previous Halo games - they will be there when the game starts, and you can set a respawn time. Random weapon spawns are a bit different - You can set multiple weapons to spawn on that location. At a random time in the match, it will choose from 1 of the weapons you set to that point, and spawn it. I believe the order in which they spawn can be controlled, but the respawn time cannot. These weapon's won't appear at the start of the game. With these 2 things you can still control map flow. As far as controlling Jetpack, there's nothing you can really do if it's not possible to physically block the path. You can thank 343 for that.