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The Royal Pools encounter from Destiny 2's first raid, the Leviathan, has been remade in Halo 5's Forge map maker.
YouTuber and Forge savant Ascend Hyperion took on the herculean task of translating a complex and mechanic-driven raid encounter to a game mode commonly used to build makeshift slides and go-kart tracks. It was far from easy and pushed the tools of Forge to their limits, as he explains in the video above.
Before we go any further, here's a brief rundown of how the Royal Pools fight works in Destiny 2. Players have to stand on four plates to raise chains until they lock into place. Once all four chains are locked, everyone can group up in a middle temple to destroy three sets of crystals. However, you need a special buff to stand on the plate without dying, and the buff timer isn't that long. As a result, players need to continually rotate between plates to refresh their buff at a central spawn in the temple, all while dealing with enemies spawning on and around plates.
OK, back to Forge land. "Halo 5 Forge actually lacks many key script elements I would've needed to create this encounter naturally," Ascend Hyperion says. "In many places, I had to improvise. A good example is with the progress on the plates. There are no progress tracking scripts in Halo 5, so I actually ended up making my own by manipulating gravity to move an object up and down a track."
The Forge recreation nails the core mechanics of the encounter. The plates have timers tied to players standing on them, and triggering all four opens up three pillars in the middle of the map that players damage in order to lower the durability on a central core which Ascend Hyperion has dubbed the Replicator, with the remade raid itself going by Replicant Crisis. The role of the Cabal enemies is filled by a team of seven enemy players, giving them a bit of an edge over the six raiders. Most importantly, the buff that saves you from the damage caused by the plates has been swapped for an overshield that respawns in the temple, which is ingenious
To my knowledge, Replicant Crisis is the first raid-type encounter ever made in Halo 5's Forge. At the very least, I've never seen mechanics like this in a Forge map, and I've certainly never seen a recreation this ambitious or accurate. Destiny raids have always been unique experiences unlike anything in traditional MMOs, and it's wild to see one recreated in the latest entry of Bungie's former baby, Halo. All of the kudos to Ascend Hyperion for pulling it off.
For another amazing Destiny 2 fan project, check out this Garry's Mod recreation of Mars.
