Halo: Reach ViDoc: Forge World

The Halo: Reach ViDoc: Forge World is a ViDoc that concentrates on the map Forge World. It is the fourth Reach ViDoc released.

Transcript

Tyson Green: "The first time I looked at Forge World, I was like 'Oh hey, cool that's...' 'Oh...' 'Holy! You guys did what!?'"

Derek Carroll: "There's just way too much. You can't keep it all in your head at once."

Marcus Lehto: "It was so beyond our production capability. We were just like 'That's crazy. We can't do that.' I couldn't stop the artist who started creating it; I loved it".

Chris Carney: "Forge is our editing tool that players can build their own maps and at its core it's a map editor."

Tyson Green: "We always had this vision right from the get-go..."

"That anyone can build anything."

"Giving the fans the tools they can take it and run with it and make it their own."

Chad Armstrong: "Forge World actually started as five separate maps."

Steve Cotton: "And I said 'Wouldn't it be cool if like, you could play this and go over there and then play over there if you wanted?'. And Forge World was born."

Chris Carney: "There are lot of people telling us 'No you can not ship this as one big map.'

Jon Cable: "We have this awesome new automatically generated LOD system called impostering that makes objects that are really far away really cheap to draw."

Chad Armstrong: "We're pushing what we could do with the Forge budget so that lets us have many more objects up at the screen at once which lets us put more objects into Forge."

Jon Cable: "Interesting to take the Banshee or Falcon out for a spin in Forge World because it actually takes a while to get from one end to the other."

Steve Cotton: "The second you come into this space you should know that you are on Halo."

Chris Carney: "Our old friends, the Forerunners, come back because the Forerunners create all sorts of cool, interesting pieces of geometry."

Steve Cotton: "We wanted to give people a variety of locations that they could Forge in a different way. So, a gulch, an island, an interior, a very small outdoor pocket and then the rock of which was based on Ascension."

Chris Carney: "Let's use a lot interesting parts that people can manipulate it or we can be change it. Why don't we bring back Blood Gulch can carve it all up in pieces so that people can start manipulating in interesting ways. And then Sanctuary was the other one. The Cage. Paridiso - that's just Chad and I playing with the map editor and actually building cool maps within Forge World. I mean, we're doing that exactly how fans would do it."

Tyson Green: "We definitely looked at what we did in Halo 3 and said, 'What can we learn from this'? It's one thing to build a stunning amount of map variants, but nobody was expecting Forge Art I don't think, like that was just a complete 'Whoa... what'."

Chad Armstrong: "The Rube Goldberg Machines, yeah those are everywhere."

Chris Carney: "In Halo 3, it was cool that you could move things around, but it was still kinda' clunky."

Chad Armstrong: "And we're like, 'We have to make this better.'"

Tyson Green: "What are some of the tricks that the community is using, and how can we make those not be tricks and just make those be tools?"

Jon Cable: "We took that stuff and made it like a real feature. There's normal, phased, and fixed. So normal is the Halo 3 style, it bumps into stuff and you let it go and it falls to the ground, and moves around 'n stuff. And fixed is the same thing, except when you let it go it stays exactly where it was. And then phased is the coolest because it means that while you're editing the object it's not actually interacting with the environment. You can put it through a wall, you can put it, you know, through other objects."

Chad Armstrong: "Which changed everything for Forge, like immediately."

Steve Cotton: "It's much easier to build a forge space, there's snaps, and rotates, and degrees, and units that you can move things. You can be very precise."

Tyson Green: "The camera controls, it's actually really good for object placement, because little touches on the stick don't translate into really sudden, jumpy movements. And then we also have a fine editing mode. You click the stick in, and then your camera starts moving very slowly."

Chad Armstrong: "You're not spending like three hours getting one block to line up directly to three other blocks."

Tyson Green: "You can select individual objects and say, 'Get rid of all the objects of this type', so if you're trying to get rid of all the spawn points on the map because you want to go and replace all the spawn points, you can do that."

Chris Carney: "You can do custom colors, you can take these forge pieces and say, 'Hey, that's blue,' so the blue base can truly look like the blue base.

Tyson Green: "Reach's expanded sandbox includes new things like, you know, jetpacks, and if people want to build some sort of 3D map and really, really make use of the jetpack, they can do that now."

Chad Armstong: "Custom Game options and forge go together like peanut butter and jelly. You're able to do things with gametypes that people might not even expect. My favorite example is in King of the Hill, where the Warthog is the Hill."

Chris Carney: "I am super excited to see what people do with it when it goes out, because there's so much crazy stuff in there that's amazing."

Derek Carroll: "We are shipping maps on the disk that we made in Forge ourselves. So, the tools are there, if you have the time and the talent, you can make it."

Tyson Green: "The community is just going to outstrip us and spank us."

Chris Carney: "With the new tagging system you can save a forge variant, you can post it to your fileshare, and then you can say, you know, 'Sweet New Map'."

Chad Armstrong: "Things that are good are downloaded by a lot of people, and passed around to a lot of people and that makes the really sweet stuff bubble up to the top. I'm looking forward to what the next big community gametype is going to be."

Steve Cotton: "We realize that Reach is our Swansong to Halo, and what better way to do that than to let people do what we've been doing all along, which is creating new, cool maps."

Jon Cable: "It's nice to go out with a bang, and this is, this is a pretty big one."

Video ends as a Monitor flies off into the distance.

Trivia

• This ViDoc announces Forge World for the first time, and was first released at Comic-Con 2010.
• This ViDoc shows off Forge's enhancements, examples being that players can now keep objects in the air, and phase objects together.
• This is the third Halo: Reach ViDoc, the other two being "Carnàge Carnivàle" which focused on multiplayer and on the beta, and "Once More Unto The Breach" which was focused on re-vamping the engine for Reach.