Mobbed opinion aside, HW2's art style is a step in the right direction for sure. Also Tom French, so I doubt your statement is completely true.
Forge is great for Halo but it's hardly impressive. The interface is clunky and the object usage is held back by redundancy to account for Xbox performance. Not to discredit the work his team put in (which may as well be separate from 343 at this point), but i'll be impressed when they make an even more powerful and easy to use dev mode for Halo 6. Or at least make it so we don't have to use decals for water puddles lmao
I feel like its just Halos shitty engine holding it back. There really isn't a reason we shouldn't be able to have 5,000 + stationary, particle effect-less objects on screen at one time in this day and age. Halo just needs a new engine. The Xbox One is plenty strong enough.
If you want efficient performance for a map creator Forge is just about worst way to handle it. It was never meant to be a map creator.
It's fast approaching that point though. All it's really missing is object and terrain sculpting, asset compiling, object and texture scaling, custom textures and audio, actual animation scripting, 100% dynamic lighting control and liquid physics. More importantly, it needs image compiling and a final render pass to remove the polygons that aren't visible to the player. The game would need to create a "gold file" as a new copy to smooth out performance, and then if you want to go and edit it again, you'll have to rerender.
I feel like "all it really needs is..." should be followed by 2-3 simple things, not that conglomeration of stuff that seems leagues above Forge atm
Sculpting requires new code Asset compiling is an extension of the group and prefab feature Texture scaling is easy, object scaling probably less so Allowing us to adjust the baked lighting is piss easy Custom audio and textures are also easy but probably wont ever happen because 343 is afraid of **** pics and rap cars Liquid physics is just an animated object (waterfall). They could give us animated blocks for puddles and creeks, but that would definitely need a compile pass to remove the parts of the effect that are not being rendered if it's merged into floors.
The best would be if could just create a blockout out of actual geometry and not just a bunch of models cobbled together. aka give us a proper map creator
I don't know about you guys but when I make something 3ds max. I always make prefabs and put them together. You know like 90% of devs today.