LEIPZIG, Germany--Halo 3 may be darn near finished at this moment--we're talking a matter of days, according to Bungie's Brian Jarrard--but that doesn't mean the famed developer is finished revealing new features to be included in this massively anticipated sequel. At Games Convention, we got to take a first look at the Forge, an unexpected but very welcome surprise inclusion in Halo 3 that will let you tinker with every aspect of your multiplayer maps short of the basic level geometry itself. It's one-part level editor, one-part Garry's Mod, and it looks like it's going to make for some particularly madcap multiplayer experiences.
You can use the Forge mode all by yourself if you just want to tinker with Halo 3's maps, but it supports up to eight players in a game simultaneously, so you and all other players can be editing the map at the same time as you're slaying within it. It works like this: You jump into a multiplayer map as a normal playable character, so you're still running around as Master Chief with a gun sticking out from the bottom of the screen. But you can jump into "edit" mode at the touch of a button, which essentially turns you into a floating camera that you can fly all around the map at will. (In a multiplayer setting, your character will turn into a hovering Monitor like 343 Guilty Spark when you're in edit mode.)
So what can you do in edit mode? It would be more appropriate to ask what you can't do. You'll have access to the full list of weapons, vehicles, power-ups, spawn points, and everything else that you as a player can use in some fashion in the main game, and you can spawn any of those into the environment whenever and wherever you like. Feel like laying waste in a scorpion? Drop it in right in front of you. You can't add as many scorpions as you like, though; each map will have a specific memory budget, represented at the bottom screen with a dollar figure and also a bar graph. Each item you add to the map subtracts a little from the budget, so you can only add to the limit of the remaining memory. Of course, you can always delete other objects if you want to add something else.
The Forge will obviously be great for customizing a map extensively while you're offline, and once you've saved a new configuration, you can upload it to Xbox Live for all other Halo 3 players to access. But as we mentioned, the Forge also serves as a multiplayer mode of its own. You can have a full competitive or team-based game going, with each player still able to freely access the edit mode. So you can pop in any vehicle, weapon, or power-up that suits the situation at hand, which means you'll see battles quickly escalating as players attempt to one-up each other with better and better weapons and items. Furthermore, you can delete other players' spawned objects the same way you can delete your own, so if you're fast enough on the controls, you can erase that warthog or scorpion before the other player even has a chance to use it. The implications for potential hilarity in this mode are obvious, we figure.
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