Halo Reach - Forge World
Bungie recently took the wraps off the Forge editor at Comic Con for their upcoming title Halo Reach, it is a huge improvement over the previous version included with Halo 3, which was safe to say quite clunky and restrictive. It is now a very clean, very usable editor with fine-tuned controls and a better object collision system allowing for more control over objects and the way they interact with each other.
But what people may not know is that the Halo Community itself wanted this, a long time ago and what a group of hackers achieved in 2004 was a map editor for the original Halo (xBox) – all well before Halo 3’s in-game version which shipped September 25th 2007.
The Forge Editor is essentially a map editor for the multiplayer aspect of the game, the editor allows you to Spawn, Move and Delete game-world objects – not the actual terrain however, like some other map editors.
When players first got their hands on this new tool in Halo 3 the community went absolutely crazy, and the sheer amount of different things that the community created took Bungie by surprise, they knew it was going to be a hit, they just didn’t release how big it was going to be and how the community would take it to its limits.
Example Halo 3 Forge Art - Ghostbusters: Who You Gonna Call
But it was easy to see how much the Halo Community at large wanted to mess around with different aspects of the game, you can see this from the hive of activity in the Halo Modding scene.
Perhaps this is where Bungie got the idea from, straight from the Halo Modding Scene – or maybe it was always in the back of their minds that it was something they wanted to do and the technology of the Xbox360 allowed them to do this.
When I initially saw the new Forge I was instantly reminded of a picture I had taken back in 2004 when I doing the exact same thing, before pretty much everyone else – and I want people to know that we had this, and not to forget, which is why I’m writing this post..
