When 334 Industries makes Halo 4, they need to improve Forge.
The first problem is the maps. Maps aren’t big enough! There’s barely any room to breathe in Reach! Forge World’s Canyon is eight hundred feet wide and probably about a thousand feet long, but that just isn’t wide enough! In Halo 4, we should get a canvas that’s one million feet wide and two million feet long, so that even the most ambitious mappers among us can Forge until their fingers snap off from overuse!
But a bigger map won’t fix all the problems. The object palette is minuscule! Bungie gave us hundreds of objects to choose from, but come on! Is that really enough to build a fully-fledged map? We need more decorations! 343 should take every single decorative object from every single map in every single Halo game ever, and put all of that into Halo 4’s Forge. If it doesn’t take three hours to get from one end of the list to the other, then we need more to work with.
But even a larger object palette won’t solve all of our troubles. I mean, why should we even be limited to objects? Why not let us do whatever we want to the objects? We should be able to change an object’s state. Want an object that’s on fire? Charred? Burnt? Rusted? Frozen? Scratched? Holographic? Electrocuted and giving off sparks? Covered in blood? Broken in half? Broken in thirds? Broken in fourths? Broken in thirtieths? Cut into two pieces at exactly a 29.316-degree angle? Not only should we have these basic options available to us – we should be able to combine them. If I can’t place a shattered burnt frozen scratched flaming slime-covered statue of Pluto, the Roman god of death, then Forge just won’t do it for me.
Even with all that, though, there’s still more things that we’ll need before we can start creating great maps. What if we could create our own campaigns? We should get a menu full of options to customize our campaign. One of the items on this menu would be “Add Voice”. When selected, you will be directly connected (via VOIP) to one of 343’s professional voice actors, who will read the words you type with the emotions you specify. Gone are the days where the game developer got to tell the story; with this change, the players get to tell their tales!
But no campaign would be complete without AI! 343 should allow us to spawn any enemy from any Halo game in the world – from the smallest Grunts to the hugest Scarabs. But of course, there would need to be some programming done first. 343 would have to develop the ultimate AI, able to navigate in an infinitely-changeable environment. But hey, that’s probably as easy as cooking spaghetti. 343 could get it done in a week, amirite?
“How,” you might be wondering, “can we create a good campaign when we’re stuck with Halo’s game mechanics?” I have the answer.
Halo 4 should contain other games inside of itself. Why create just one game? 343 should create a Borg hivemind of several disparate games, allowing us to mix-and-match the pieces. You want the destruction of Red Faction: Guerrilla? You got it. You want the parkour and movement of Brink? You got it. You want the time paradoxes of Singularity? You got it. You want the classic 1940s’ music of Fallout? YOU GOT IT. If it exists, 343 should add it to Halo 4. Now, granted, some of these features took several years to create, and many, many, many hours of work to perfect. Most of those games’ engines were built from the ground up to support their unique features. But all that means is that the work’s already been done, right?
How do we know if Halo 4’s Forge is good enough?
Simple.
If Halo 4 doesn’t allow me to create a map in which a Grunt eats a rotting banana, throws the peel to the side, and then an Elite trips over the peel and collides with a fractured, spider-infested statue of Duke Nukem, toppling that structure and sending it smashing into a gigantic warehouse, tearing a massive hole in the wall which allows a horde of time-zombies to escape, forcing the player to repel time zombies using an irradiated baseball bat carved from the wood of the Deku Tree and infused with the blood of mercilessly-slaughtered Pikachus whose lives in a tranquil, Minecraft-style mountain paradise are detailed in a six-hour cutscene narrated by Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones speaking in perfect unison so it sounds like their voices are perfectly merged like some kind of Super Saiyan hybrid…
THEN HALO 4 WILL SUCK BALLS.
Discuss.
