Skip to main content

Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Halo 5's new Forge mode looks much improved

But it's not out until December - a month-and-a-half after the game.

Halo 5's new Forge mode comes out in December, developer 343 Industries has confirmed.

Halo 5 comes out on 27th October.

In a post on Halo Waypoint, studio head Josh Holmes said 343 will update Forge mode, which lets players work together to create new Halo maps, with new features on an ongoing basis following its release.

Forge design lead Tom French said 343 wanted to streamline the building process with Halo 5's new Forge.

A raft of changes have been made to the controller-based editing control scheme. For example, the camera no longer snaps to objects being edited. Instead, you can freely position the camera to find the best vantage point to edit from. There's also a contextual control helper, which lets you see, in real time, what each controller input does.

Brand new is the ability to group a collection of objects together to make them behave like a single object. Grouped objects can optionally be welded to their "parent" object. So, as French describes, you can make a football with traffic cone spikes that rolls around, or attach a weapon pad to a larger animating object.

Meanwhile, French said there are over 1600 objects. Previous versions of Forge had a couple of hundred objects. There are new object types, too, including FX emitters, invisible blockers and even a large whale toy.

You can Forge on any Arena/Breakout map, but 343 has built three additional large maps designed for Forge: Alpine, Glacier and Space. Space, which is a working title, sounds interesting. It's so called because it has no terrain. "It's a big empty map with nothing nailed down but the boundary markers at the edges of the map which go away at game time," French explained. "It's pretty much as blank of a map as possible so the sky (or space) is really the limit.

There's more detail on the new Forge over at Halo Waypoint and in the video, below.

Watch on YouTube