I know that these threads are quite the frequent occurrence 'round these parts. However, I just wanted to voice some ideas that could potentially improve the Forge experience. This is all coming from a dedicated Halo fan, who has spent tons of time with his Forge buddies b*tching about what Forge mode really needs in the future. Tell me whether or not you like these ideas. I’m not waving these ideas at 343 saying, “HEY, PUT THESE IN THE GAME!!”, but this is rather a list of what I hope to see in Forge Mode, and what I would implement if I was a producer of Halo 4. Also, yes, I know that many of these ideas have been proposed many times, but that only proves that they would be wonderfully satisfying additions to Forge.
Necessary Improvements:
-The ability to select or “highlight” multiple objects at once, along with the options to rotate and position them all as if they were one object.
-Copying and pasting, especially for the above “multiple objects” system.
-Object gluing, to attach objects in-game, such as giving a Warthog some ghetto armor, or making a cube of wood palettes.
-Details such as blood splatters, signs, text, and stencils to put on walls and floors
-The ability to have objects disappear after a set amount of time
-No restrictions on object amounts. The whole “budget” thing is understandable, as we shouldn’t overload the map. The whole, “Oh, you can only have 10 dumpsters” thing makes absolutely no sense to me.
-Invisible barriers, similar, if not identical to the ones that keep us from getting out of maps, and simply act as invisible walls. Kill Zones are not the same!
More “Frivolous” Improvements:
-Trees, with a built in randomizer, so you don’t get the same trees every time, and you don’t have to keep distinguishing between “Tree 1”, “Tree 2”, “Tree 40”, “Medium Tree”, “Bare Tree 3”, etc.
-Preset object skins (Sleek Steel, Rust, Rock, Grass, Natural, Wood, Gunmetal, etc.) There can be certain presets for certain objects, and they can be specific to the map.
-Day and night versions of the main Forge map. Before this idea instantly gets rejected, here’s how it could work: Maybe when the map is “Saved As…” or renamed, there will be an option to select what time of day the map is. All this would technically require would be two versions of the map built into the disc - night and day. Say, the two maps in the game’s coding could be “forgeworldday” and “forgeworldnight”, but the map will simply display “Forge World” in-game - the exact same is a daytime variant until the game is actually started. The little map preview picture could look different too. When a nighttime map is saved, it will be internally stored as a “forgeworldnight” map. Although it will be saved under “Forge World” in the Forge menu, it will technically be a different base map, just with different lighting and a different sky. When a map is changed from day to night or vice-versa, the game can take some processing time to create the map on it’s own, simply by generating the objects with the exact same coordinates as the corresponding day/night map.
-Reskinning for weapons and vehicles. This could be utilized the same way as editing Mongoose colors in Halo Reach.
-Terrain editing. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of this idea, but I’m not opposed to it either. The player could spawn a 3D grassy “field” of a certain size, up to maybe the size of two or three “Colosseum Walls” put together. These thick fields of grass could be edited with “terrain tools”. There can be tools such as “Concave”, “Convex”, “Random Warp”, “Pinch Point”, etc. One could use these tools to edit the “lay of the land” if you will. “Concave” could depress a selected area of the field, and make it concave (duh). “Convex” would create hills where the tool is used. “Random Warp” could randomly generate some realistic terrain in a selected area. “Pinch Point” could allow one to grab a certain point, and shift it up or down, or move it around.
If anybody has any other good additions that I should include, I’ll be sure to edit this list. Thanks for reading. :]
