Don’t get me wrong, Halo 5’s Forge is great and has been used to create some pretty amazing things. However, for me at least, the new controls centred around the objects rather than the player are very ill-suited to a controller, and it has been very difficult to get into. I miss the fun times of Forge when you’d go in with friends and goof around with objects. Maybe it’s because it’s what I started with, but moving the objects around the player was more intuitive for me and made placing them, especially a lot of them, much less of a hassle. I’ve been out of touch with the Halo community for a while so this might be a very niche problem but at least for me Forge doesn’t feel like Forge anymore. I haven’t played Halo 5: Forge on the PC, but I’m assuming this style of object manipulation is much more comfortable with a mouse and keyboard.
Back in the day the devs made excuses for why the option for the old control scheme wasn’t available, stating that they wouldn’t work with their shiny new Forge. That’s silly because Halo 5 Forge is basically all the previous Forge with more objects and some new features. It’s not a proper map editor, it’s an object editor that is trying to be a map editor, and it suffers for it. In Halo: Infinite we need a proper map editor, a map creator, with terrain editing, something the community has been asking for ever since Halo 3, as well as a proper object editor - classic Forge - as an integrated companion alongside it. New-style Forge plus old-style Forge combined to make creating maps fun and simple, not just with friends, but alone as well.
The game has been in development for 5 years. Even if having a dedicated proper map creator alongside a dedicated object editor - Forge - isn’t practical or desirable by the devs for some reason, the more control options the better, and in this case in particular they shouldn’t be reserved for PC players or even just PC modders, since my gripe is with the Xbox One controller being poorly suited to Halo 5’s style of object manipulation in the first place. Again, maybe it’s because I’m having trouble adapting or because Forge in previous entries was so smooth with such a low bar for entry, but in my opinion Halo 5’s style of object manipulation is jerky, clunky, frustrating, and unintuitive, at least with a controller.
Finally, the Reach Forge structure objects were a godsend to work with. They made just winging it and coming up with ideas off the cuff much easier. Again, Halo 5’s greater variety of base objects is pretty fantastic, but having to make everything yourself from scratch can be off-putting and intimidating. The lack of gameplay options for Forge suffers as well. You can’t create custom gametypes for use in Forge to test different playstyles without loading it in Custom Games first and going back and forth, which, combined with Halo 5’s clunky, laggy, and slow UI, is a real pain. Hopefully Halo: Infinite can provide options for two very different styles of Forge and finally take the next step in map creating. Oh, and, folders. Halo 5’s map menus were a mess. Revert to the previous system, preferably something like Reach’s original UI, and add folders and other organizational tools to make navigating maps and gametypes a breeze.