First of all, yes, I am aware that Castle isn’t axactly a “forge” map pack. Yes, I know Forge Island just dropped and that’s great. I’m not talking about building entirely new maps, I’m talking about scenery, something which is being more and more neglected.
Let’s take a look back to Halo 3, because nobody ever does that on these forums, right?.. never mind. Back then, Forge was nowhere near as powerful when it came to building new maps, but still very good at changing existing ones. The list of scenery for High Ground was almost as long as the list of structures in today’s forge maps. It might not be the building blocks for new maps, but some excellent stuff came out of it. The infection variant, for example, had a really cool, just-thrown-together look to it, and machinima creators could assemble sets just the way they wanted. 343 demonstrated that they still care about machinima with a green screen in Forge Island, but it looks like Certain Affinity don’t share that enthusiasm.
Now fast forward to today. I went in to forge in the new Castle maps, and what scenery was there? Three crates and some sand bags. Three -Yoinking!- crates… and some sandbags… What happened? Why is there such a drastic reduction in the amount of scenery? You may be thinking “But I can still see scenery on the map” Well, you’re right, and that’s the worst thing. There is scenery in the map, but it’s all fixed. Daybreak is covered in barricades, and abandoned cars are scattered throughout Perdition, but they are fixed! they can’t be picked up, can’t be delete and can’t be moved. Not only does this prevent any minor map changes I described earlier, in some cases it just doesn’t make sense. A grenade will flip a Warthog over, and maybe even destroy it, but you can fire every weapon you can find at an abandoned forklift truck, half the size of a hog, and it will emerged, unmoved and unscratched. To me this just seems like lazy game design.
I think the new maps look great, and they play pretty well too, but the way scenery has been applied just doesn’t hold up to the standard of previous Halo maps, and that kind of suggests that someone just doesn’t care any more. Thoughts?