Wow, that's all I can say. Well, "wow" and "It's about damn time".
Unreal and Half Life have had editors available to the public for years, even Quake came with it's own editor all those years ago. Granted, no other console game I know of has ever given the end user this much power, and there's only so much manipulation you can expect someone to get out of two bumpers and triggers, a D-pad, A B X and Y, a select and a start button, but I think they should have given us this in Halo 2.
I guess Bungie had their reasons for not doing this sooner. Maybe they were trying to protect the integrity of their product, which I certainly don't blame them for. Have you ever seen some of the crap that gets thrown together and called a "map" in the UT franchise? Ugh. How many times have I wasted three minutes of my life downloading a piece of garbage map hacked together by a thirteen year old that bothered me so much that I maliciously hunted it down and deleted it from my hard drive myself because I was so offended by it that I couldn't bear to wait thirty days for the program to clear the cache?
Too many times, friends, too many times.
It's a double edged sword, I want content, GOOD content, which I know the public is capable of generating (Have you seen some of the UT 03 and 04 maps out there? There are maps created for free by the community that surpass anything Epic employees ever did for money.) but I don't want crap. Maybe now that the trilogy is over they could release an editor for use on the PC that we can create maps and mods with and then load to our XBox 360's. Now that the trilogy is over we won't be able to besmirch the quality of their content. If anything we may look back and say "that game was great until people started making their own maps, then it went to the dogs.". And no one would be able to hold Bungie responsible for it.
I'm already hungry for some new maps, I would like to have Warlock back in particular. I HOPE Forge will help level the field against those kids that play eight hours a day. If the sniper rofle, sword, shotgun, and rocket launcher are moved around the rest of us might have a small chance at surviving against these freaks of nature that memorize every stinking weapon location on every stinking map.
So sayeth me.
Unreal and Half Life have had editors available to the public for years, even Quake came with it's own editor all those years ago. Granted, no other console game I know of has ever given the end user this much power, and there's only so much manipulation you can expect someone to get out of two bumpers and triggers, a D-pad, A B X and Y, a select and a start button, but I think they should have given us this in Halo 2.
I guess Bungie had their reasons for not doing this sooner. Maybe they were trying to protect the integrity of their product, which I certainly don't blame them for. Have you ever seen some of the crap that gets thrown together and called a "map" in the UT franchise? Ugh. How many times have I wasted three minutes of my life downloading a piece of garbage map hacked together by a thirteen year old that bothered me so much that I maliciously hunted it down and deleted it from my hard drive myself because I was so offended by it that I couldn't bear to wait thirty days for the program to clear the cache?
Too many times, friends, too many times.
It's a double edged sword, I want content, GOOD content, which I know the public is capable of generating (Have you seen some of the UT 03 and 04 maps out there? There are maps created for free by the community that surpass anything Epic employees ever did for money.) but I don't want crap. Maybe now that the trilogy is over they could release an editor for use on the PC that we can create maps and mods with and then load to our XBox 360's. Now that the trilogy is over we won't be able to besmirch the quality of their content. If anything we may look back and say "that game was great until people started making their own maps, then it went to the dogs.". And no one would be able to hold Bungie responsible for it.
I'm already hungry for some new maps, I would like to have Warlock back in particular. I HOPE Forge will help level the field against those kids that play eight hours a day. If the sniper rofle, sword, shotgun, and rocket launcher are moved around the rest of us might have a small chance at surviving against these freaks of nature that memorize every stinking weapon location on every stinking map.
So sayeth me.
3 comments:
Major Nelson touched on this once. I'll try to summarize.
So as I understand it, the reason you don't have map builders on console games is because they are essentially closed systems. That is, the entire system has limited functionality when compared to a full fledged operating system.
For example, the file system on a 360 is years beyond the original Xbox, but does not expose nearly as much functionality to the users Windows or even DOS. What bungie has exposed in the game type / map variations editors is huge, especially with the ability to upload and download content.
Secondly, those polygons are touchy things. While you would have to go ape shit to overpower the 360s GPU, I'm sure some near-autistic 12 year-old on Christmas break could do it. It might also be possible to manipulate the polys as to confuse the rendering engine and crash it. On a PC that's not a big deal. The consoles are a mixture of software and hardware and everything has to be be balanced.
So kudos to bungie for making this possible. I haven't played with forge yet, but I am definitely looking forward to it.
Thanks for that, maybe if I someday swipe the old lady's iPod I'll subscribe to that podcast.
Here's something else Forge related:
Just about every day of the week I have three fourteen year olds in my house playing video games. Since H3/Forge came out they've been getting creative, which I'm always happy about.
What's SUPPOSED to happen: One kid "Forges" changes to a map and sets rules while the other two blast each other patiently. When complete all three play by the rules and life goes on.
What REALLY happens: The two waiting for the map to be complete eventually get in the way of the guy making the changes or start plinking away at him with a sniper rifle out of boredom. Map kid gets pissed, drops a Scorpion on one kid, spawns a missile pod and blasts the other to pieces. All hell breaks loose and screaming ensues as everyone spawns whatever weapon they want and goes to town on the other two.
Too disorganized for my tastes, but at least they're having fun. That's what matters.
They did manage to come up with a neat game out of all this, Hide and Seek. Player one takes the form of the Monitor and hides, the other two have to find him and blast him. Looks like fun since the monitor can hide in some pretty tight spots.
I personally don't see why the two otehr kids couldn't have just tried to kill each other while the first kid was mucking with items. Shrug. Like the hide and seek game. neat idea.
yeah, on the bungie podcast they talked about playing in forge mode. Some of it even going as far as having a monitor on each team playing god by spawning the weapons their team needed. Overshield, Spartan Laser, Scorpion, whatever. Also talked about the monitor picking up items like large crates to create moving cover for their team mates.
Me, I can see creating map variant and getting it 90% tuned in solo mode. Then get a bunch of players in forge to test it out. Tune that last 10% with people on the map.
Post a Comment