Xbox Wire has shared a rundown about the Forge AI Toolkit coming to Halo Infinite in Season 5: Reckoning next week and it's being labelled a "big" deal, with the potential here considered to be huge.
In brief, the new toolkit will allow Spartans to input the Campaign AI (including allies and enemy AI) into their Forge creations and then share them. 343's Forge Lead Designer Michael Schorr touched on the possibilities:
Michael Schorr: “You could make a twisting hallway and around every corner have AI spawn in front of you, and in order to progress you need to kill them. But there’s a lot of cool things you can do; MOBA things you can do. One of our engineers here prototyped a tower defense game with the AI. So, there’s a lot of flexibility in these tools.”
"Forge has been around for a long time, and we’ve seen a lot of cool variations on multiplayer themes, but we’ve never seen what players can do with the AI. We’re going to see people remaking the intro battle when you first land on the Ring. We’re going to see that and that’s huge.”
The Forge AI Toolkit has been in development for "roughly 18 months" and will also allow players to add AI to existing Forge creations, across any game mode. Over 100 nodes have been added to Season 5, with around 75 "just related to AI" functionalities.
Forgers who have been testing out the new toolkit are already praising it:
The same overview of the new Forge AI toolkit also made note of how Forge has so far generated 27 million custom matches, 2 million user-generated creations, and 40+ user-generated maps that have been added to public matchmaking playlists.
One last thing about Season 5 is a reminder that players will now be able to progress their Battle Pass and Operation Pass when playing certain eligible custom matches. This means you could essentially jump into a Forge creations custom experience, play a PVE experience, and earn XP.