First things first, lets start off with the new ViDoc, "Forge World." Take a look at the video below, packed with 6 minutes of Forge 2.0 goodness.
I'll give you a second to wipe the drool off your shirt. Forge 2.0 is Bungie's all new, revamped map editor that'll be accessible, as usual, right through your Halo: Reach disc. So, what's new? Well, lets start off with the controls.
Like the video said, the controls for the camera in Forge 2.0 have been tweaked to give the player an all around smoother experience. That means no more spazzy jerks when tapping the control stick. It's now more refined, making it easier to make those minute adjustments and if you click in the stick, you'll be treated with a zoomed in view of the screen, almost like zooming in with the sniper rifle minus the scope. It's the perfect tool for all you perfectionists out there who need every block and every wall to be exactly aligned. Speaking of alignment, you'll also be given some new options, allowing the user to snap to right angles and snap to grid, which makes lining out the wall of a building 10x faster and much cleaner looking. Also, judging by the video, there seems to be a "rotate around a fixed point option," that rotates an object 360 degrees while you're grasping it, a pretty neat addition in my opinion. Enough with the controls though, lets get on to the all new features in Forge 2.0.
If you thought that Bungie wasn't paying attention to all you Forgers out there, you'd be surprised. Bungie's seen all of the exploitations of the respawn system in Halo 3, making objects float in midair and fuse into each other, and decided to make your lives a whole lot easier. Now, there is a convenient option in the pop up menu that lets the player decide whether they want an object to be Normal, Phased or Fixed. Normal means that it's gonna be in game physics. Once you let go of the object, it's gonna fall to the ground and bounce and tumble off of other objects. Phased means that the object can now go through anything. Want, to fuse a wall into the side of a mountain? Just set the object to Phased and you can literally move it into the mountain and have it sticking out of the side as if it were built into the side of the cliff face. The last option, Fixed, is pretty self explanatory. It basically means that the object, once released will be fixed to whatever position you had it in. Move, a container up into the air, set it to Fixed, let go and the container stays floating in the air, exactly how you left it.
I think Bungie has really outdone themselves with these three features alone. This is going to take map making to a whole other level. People, like myself, who never understood how to make objects float, or fuse into each other in Halo 3, can now do those things with the simple toggle of a switch. You thought Halo 3 had a ton of map variants, wait til the masses get a hold of this.
Along with the 3 modes, players can now color code objects, making a "true" red and blue base for team based game types. It's a subtle, but welcomed addition to the forge arsenal. Bungie also hinted at being able to tweak game types, giving players options, such as King of the Hill where the warthog is the hill. They didn't really give any other specifics, so its probably safe to say that there will be plenty more game tweaks available once Reach ships out September 14.
There's one more thing I wanted to touch on before we move over to the single player side of things, and that's the "World" aspect of "Forge World." To put it simply, Bungie went "BIG." They've pretty much compiled every type of map into one huge world, resting on one of the Halo Rings. You want a close quarters map, Forge World's got it, a giant battlefield, it's got that too. Pretty much any type of arena you can think of, Forge World has it. I was pretty stunned when I heard about Forge World, and it just shows how smart Bungie is. Instead of having people complain about not having this, or not having that, they just decided to give everyone a giant canvas and basically said, "Make whatever you want." It's a brilliant idea, and looks like it could provide for an endless number of maps and variants.
That's about it for the Forge side of things, now lets move onto the Campaign.
Short and sweet! A few new shots of the main protagonist looking BA, and another glimpse of the space combat, but really nothing too new. Personally, I kind of like these kind of trailers. They don't give away too much and give you a sense that this could be something epic. It's essentially a hype trailer, it even mentions "hype" in the trailer. I have to admit, it got me pretty hyped, and gave me a little hope that this could be a little deeper than your average Halo story. Oh, and did anyone else notice the nice, new facial models. Quite a step up from Halo 3 and ODST's facial modeling.
All in all, that's about all I've got as far as Halo: Reach goes. I could bore you with another couple of paragraphs about the new Firefight mode, but I think I'll leave that for another day, maybe even the upcoming dual podcasts, one should be up around Wednesday and another one around Saturday, look for a post mid-week detailing them both.
Anyways, that's it. Don't forget to leave your comments below, join us in the forums if you haven't signed up already and if you're feeling generous you can donate to VGH by clicking on the button to the left, you know the one with VGH's Henchmen of the Month, Team Rocket! Thanks for reading and have a great week.
Monday, August 2, 2010
I really can't wait till game comes out. And it's only a month away!
Dual wielding podcast, F yeah!
I have so much money saved up for the games coming this fall :P
Welcome back, Jacob!