343 Industries is Overhauling Forge Mode in Halo 5: Guardians

Forge mode has been in Halo games since 2007’s Halo 3, but for Halo 5: Guardians, 343 Industries wanted to really improve and expand upon what is possible for the popular map editor.

Writing on the HaloWaypoint blog, design lead of Forge mode Tom French said, “When we began working on Halo 5 a little over three years ago, we had the opportunity to take a step back and consider the future of Forge mode. This would be the first Halo game built from the ground up for Xbox One, and with it we wanted to deliver tools that would empower a new generation of Forgers.”

He continued on to say that a primary goal in designing Forge mode in Halo 5: Guardians was to make building faster and more streamlined.

“We took philosophical cues from professional level editing tools to redesign our core systems to make them more powerful while maintaining fluid controller-based editing,” he said. “It was important for us to rip out arbitrary restrictions in order to unshackle map builders, empowering more creativity with every piece placed, enabling imagination to run rampant, and find ideas that we never even expected.”

At the core, improving how the controls worked with the Xbox One controller was the key to making Forge mode faster and more streamlined to build in.

“In the beginning, my engineering partner Ben and I met and drew on whiteboards to work through ideas and break down changes,” French said. “Ben would then head back to his desk and soon we’d have a new iteration up and running to try. We ended up experimenting with probably a dozen different methods but none of them felt right to us. Everything we tried wasn’t fluid enough for us because we were trying to cram things into the previous control schemes. After taking a step back and taking a weekend to soak on it we came back and put the new ideas up on the board. A few days later Ben had new controls hooked up that finally worked.”

Additionally, 343 Industries brought in five members of the community it affectionately calls “Community Cartographers” to test out the Forge mode that French and his team were creating.

“Throughout their visit, the cartographers provided feedback and feature requests that were then turned around in nightly updates from the Forge team,” today’s blog post reads. “We had a camera crew on site to document this week-long collaboration and we’ll be sharing that footage in the near future.”

A section of that documentary can be viewed below:

Recently, 343 Industries and Microsoft detailed how consumers who purchase the Limited Collector’s Edition of Halo 5: Guardians can exchange their digital download code for a physical copy of the game.

Halo 5: Guardians will be released on Oct. 27, 2015 for Xbox One. Check out the live-action launch trailer here.

Source: Halo Waypoint