: I heavily disagree about Forge's future, just in terms of the fact that
: increasing complexity empowers a % of the player base, but also reduces
: accessibility of the feature as well. I look to Blizzard's editors.
: StarCraft's editor was robust but straightforward; triggers were basic
: IF/AND/WHILE kind of functions, terrain was isometric. With WarCraft III,
: the game was 3D and cinematics became an in-game function; the result was
: that the editor was much more of a tool oriented towards programmers. With
: StarCraft II the functionality increased even further, but by that point I
: was lost. Unless I had an eye towards game development the complexity of
: the tools actively impeded my efforts for creating a map (such as the
: increasing number of stuff you had to do just to get a basic map *working*
: for a custom match) and made me discouraged to learn more.

: At its core, Forge is very much a "build stuff with LEGO" editor,
: and I've always posited that's its *strength* rather than a real weakness.

I agree that's it great being what it is, but it does have real weaknesses when it comes to complex and detailed structures, and it doesn't need to be one or the other, it could have the traditional palette of objects (and indeed it should for a variety of reasons) and all the abilities to manipulate them, but also the ability to do more in-depth creation of things. The only problem I see with that is looking down on maps that only use the pre-made objects, which I would hope most of us wouldn't do, but it could put people in a difficult position (including me to be fair, I might want to play traditional object-composited maps but if no one else wants to they're not getting played). If anything it's more impressive to build a big complex detailed thing with pre-made parts than it is to just plonk down the necessary polygons where they should be.

There's also the fact that despite how simple it is and how long that truth has had to filter through to everyone, a lot of people see Forge as black magic on the level of programming, or they think they couldn't possibly have the time either to learn it or to build something. The people that are ready, willing, and able to use Forge now are the kind of people that would have a higher chance of welcoming a more complex and capable editor, although a lot of them would be unhappy with it and unfortunately some would not even try to learn the new functionality.

Regardless of what direction they take, I would really like to see them take a step that sort of puts together what they're doing for light baking and object grouping and allow some kind of polygon culling. That way unreachable surfaces of objects don't cause a hit to performance by calculating interactions and taking up memory for things you'll never see. (I say it combines those things because I'm envisioning it as a menu command you would apply to a group of objects that would take a short time to run; maybe a short time isn't feasible, IDK.) I'd also like to see the ability to change the textures and the tiling origins and orientations of textures on objects (or at least the second part, changing how a texture is applied)-- we're already seeing some ability to play around with textures in the terrain pieces.