Check Out Halo 5's New Forge

343 Industries released a ton of new detail on the improved and upgraded map maker known as the Forge. For Halo 5: Guardians the Forge is a powerful and revamped toolset with all new objects, all new lighting features and brand new ways to easily move around entire groups of objects with the simple press of a button.

Over on the Halo Waypoint website they offered up a detailed rundown of the existing and improved features in Forge, as well as the new features added to the toolset. You can check out the video below.

So, some of the improved features includes a more streamlined control scheme compared to what was in the last Forge outing in Halo 4, as well as the ability to manipulate and edit up to 64 objects at a single time with the improved multi-select tool, the free cam no longer snaps to objects and a new contextual control helper allows users easier access to what the controller does and what each input can do when using Forge.

They've also refined the precision editing and added smart magnets to snap together objects with ease.

One of the biggest new features they liked talking about in the video above was the new grouping tool. This allows players to group together objects and move or edit them as a single entity. Halo 5's Forge will allow players to group together multiple objects with ease by pressing a single button and then split them up as well.

Another new feature is the welding. Very much like the welding tool in Garry's Mod, players are able to weld together grouped objects and link them to parent objects. So yes, technically you could easily design your own mechs and move them around the arena as you see fit, with various parts grouped and linked to parent parts on the mech.

New object palettes have been added and the library of objects in this iteration of the Forge has been extended to 1600. However, only 1024 objects can actually be used in a custom made map.

343 Industries has also included new object types, giving gamers more objects and special effect tools to work with, including particle emitters, decals, blocks, machinima makers and objects designed to help intros and outros easier... for machinima purposes, of course.

One of the things I'm most impressed with is the way the team is handling the asset budget for Halo 5 on the Xbox One. They have soft and hard budget systems in place so they've made it where players can pack as much stuff as possible into the map and even proceed to exceed that memory budget, but at the cost of some anomalies and glitches. 343 will allow players to exceed the “soft” budget for those of you out there who really want to push the limits with high-quality, custom made maps.

They've also added in light objects with different color grades and light fixtures. This is really impressive but I do wonder how long it will take to bake a map with custom lights or will they allow for real-time physical based lighting in the Forge maps? I guess we'll find out on October 27th.

343 has plans to unleash more videos and promo content for Halo 5's Forge leading up to release.