I’m more of a lurker than a poster on these forums, but I’d like to bring something up that’s been brought up many, many times before. Forge is a phenomenal tool that people have utilized since Halo 3 to make some pretty amazing, sometimes even breathtaking, maps that they then share with the community. It’s one of the best, if not the best, map-making tool on consoles. Forge being added to Halo 3 exponentially extended the life of the game for myself and many other players.
It also went hand-in-hand with custom gametypes. Awesome gametypes could be fabricated from the Halo 3 settings to make some pretty different and radical games, things that no player nor Bungie had ever anticipated. People then could make their own custom map to bring the whole package together. What we got was a ton of unique maps and gametypes that worked perfectly together. Halo 4’s custom game customization is pretty lame as of right now, but hopefully 343 is taking note of what we want and are working on a solution. But that’s not the point of this post. Some of you may know where I’m going with this by now.
Forge and Custom Games have generally not seen any real innovation over the past two Halo games since Forge’s introduction in Halo 3. Sure, Halo: Reach and Halo 4 added some new possibilities in Forge such as a better UI, precision movement, and proper lighting effects, but nothing as revolutionary as Forge has been added to Halo in the past two games. 343 can change this in Halo 5.
It’s time for Halo to finally receive the Custom Game Search Function that the community has been desperately begging for ever since the later days of Halo 2, and I think Halo 5 would be the perfect time to finally introduce it. Although there are people I know who are “burnt out” by Halo, they often still play when I tell them of a new map/custom game I’m trying out. This also applies to my friends who are straight-up bad at the game, yet love the craziness and silliness of custom games and still buy Halo games solely for this reason.
Some of you may say to just play customs with friends or join a forging/custom community. I actively do both of these things. The problem is that there are a ton of players who don’t have the time, energy, or patience to set up custom games with friends/random online groups at specific days and times. It can start to feel like it requires work to put together a good custom game with a lot of players.
You might also tell me that Bungie (and probably 343 in the future) already added custom maps to matchmaking so a Custom Game Finder is unnecessary. This is a good argument. Bungie did a great job of adding pretty decent/sometimes good custom maps into certain playlists. However, the majority of those maps had to go through a lot of playtesting to be added, which meant only a select minority ended up making the cut. Additionally, these maps were “competitive” maps in the sense that they were designed for base gametypes like Slayer, CTF, Oddball, etc (excluding ActionSack). A lot of players are looking for zany custom games like FatKid, Duckhunters, Jenga, Tower of Power, Cops & Robbers, etc. Bungie simply didn’t take the time to take these “different” gametypes seriously enough to add them to playlists like ActionSack or Zombies.
Halo 5 will be on the next-generation of the Xbox, and with it have even more technical capabilities. I don’t think making something like this would be easy, but I fail to see how it would be impossible to achieve. Playing through Halo CE and Halo 2, did we ever think Halo would have it’s own map-making feature? Or a film feature to replay all of our games and take screenshots and videos? Is is so insane to think something like this could be implemented? 343 has an amazing possibility to take the next step in Forge and Custom games, and it’s something I’m sure a lot of you would love to see happen.
Some people might call me crazy for bringing this up already, seeing as we JUST got Halo 4. However, something of this magnitude would have to be brought up early for 343 to actually consider it. We have to show that there is a serious demand for it.
Matchmaking has always been the “staple” of Halo, but ever since Halo 3, Custom Games has been growing in a huge way. A lot of people in the Forge and Custom Games community is feeling extremely letdown, even betrayed by 343 for the decisions they made regarding Custom Games and slight Forge alterations in Halo 4. I don’t know about you guys, but adding something like this to Halo 5 would make up for it in a big way. It’s time to take the next step, 343, and add onto what Bungie created with Custom Games and Forge.
TL;DR Go read the damn thing, it wouldn’t kill you to try to read something once in a while.