I’d like to preface this with a positive perspective, because the new Forge looks BLINDINGLY good. Seriously. I thought Forge 2.0 made me excited back in Reach. But this is something else, it just looks amazing. When I saw how usable terrain pieces were going to be, I was blown away. Then I saw the prebuilt demo map, and my jaw dropped. I want to send a HUGE thank you to everyone involved in putting this together. I’ve been a part of the Forge community since early Halo 3, and I never imagined we’d come this far. I didn’t think I could get any more excited for MCC, but this reveal did just that.
That said, something small struck me when watching the IGN First video. Just wondering what people think of the change made to water, that it’s no longer a default killzone and instead has pathing just below the surface to simulate shallow water across the whole canvas.
I can see how it’s going to save effort when creating shallow water for, say, rivers, lakes and sloping shores. I can also see how it’s going to make some less conventional map designs much more feasible.
However, imo not having water as a default death barrier is more hassle overall than it saves. Here’s why.
On, say, Forge World, water is a a death barrier by default. In this it isn’t. This means that if you want to actually use it as a death barrier (which is gonna be true of pretty much any map that isn’t built to be totally inescapable within its own geometry) you have to populate with either safe zones or kill zones. If not, any player can just walk out of the map and wander off as far as the canvas is pathed, which is pretty gamebreaking.
It’s not just island maps which use the water as a deathzone either, floating maps which aren’t inherently self contained use it too. Think about something like Lockout. Imaging dropping off the map and landing on a solid surface, just able to wander around outside the map proper. To avoid that you’re gonna have to encase your map in a safe zone, which isn’t the end of the world but takes some configuring.
And it’s a little more awkward if you want to have, say, an Island map with a Banshee. If you create a safe zone at the distance away from the shore that you want players to be able to walk out in to the water (to simulate a sloping shore which drops off to deep water) then the Banshee won’t be able to fly out of that zone either, which may not be what you want and may well be uncessarily restrictive on its flight. So you either have to extend the whole safe zone outwards to allow for proper Banshee flight area, or create multi-tiered safe zones at different heights. But worse than that, if you want to not have shallow water at the shore at all, then you have to path hard kills around the edge of the geometry very tightly. This is gonna be hella fiddly, and also restrict stuff like Banshee flying even more. Oh, you flew out a metre over the shore even though you can’t see that precisely when you’re up in the air? Blow the hell up immediately, basically ruining Banshee play. You’re basically forced in to using soft kills if you also want to use air vehicles, which means you can’t have the water as an absolute containing edge to your map even if you want to, either that or once again deal with the hassle of multi-tiered hard and soft kill/safe zones.
And even if you don’t do hard kill barriers right at the shore, it’s still gonna be fiddly. Unless your map is a very simple shape, you won’t just be able to use one soft safe to encompass it properly with a roughly uniform distance from the shore to the kill barrier. You’re gonna have to patch up the right shape with multiple overlapping ones.
And if you go with kill zones rather than safe zones, god forbid you miss a tiny spot, cause then players can just get out of your map and walk as far away as possible across the water.
All this to save the relatively tiny amount of effort it takes to create shallow water, and only relevant on the occasions I want to actually use shallow water, which isn’t often at all compared to the times this will mandate use of safe zones etc.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you think it’s worthwhile overall? Will it be useful for you? Have I missed something important here? I’d love to know what people think.