Game with the best level editor? Or the worst?

[Clorox Cowboy]

Not sure if it counts since the whole game is a level editor, but Mario Maker is pretty great and the sequel for Switch is that is coming out in a few months looks like it is going to improve on it even more.

Halo 3's forge is pretty fun as well.

 

[Stab You in the Back]

Not sure if it counts since the whole game is a level editor, but Mario Maker is pretty great and the sequel for Switch is that is coming out in a few months looks like it is going to improve on it even more.

The best part of Mario Maker is just how thoroughly broken it is, allowing people to create insane levels with a very basic toolset.

 

[CWCissey]

SimCopter.

It's Level Editor was Sim City 2000

 

[Watcher]

Objectively: Trenchbroom

Subjectively Dromed

I say subjectively because it has limitations like not allowing you to edit the vertices of a brush. Everything in the game is made of 1 or more cubes, cylinders, wedges etc.

However because of this it requires you to think very cleverly on how to make a space look the way you want it. If you inspect any of the vanilla Thief/System Shock levels the designers were extremely smart on how they made things like lamp posts and terrain.

It reminds me of the satisfying feeling you get using a lathe where you're slowly whittling down something til it looks the way you want

 

[Yaoi Zowie]

Surprised UT2k4's level editor hasn't been mentioned yet. It was so good for its time I bought the game to play with it even though I didn't care to play the game itself really. Making geometry with BSP was a revelation.

 

[Jeffrey Lebowski]

Lego Indiana Jones 2 had a great little level editor where you could pretty much make a huge puzzle level any way you wanted with the tools given and any kind of studs you wanted.

 

[Watcher]

Surprised UT2k4's level editor hasn't been mentioned yet. It was so good for its time I bought the game to play with it even though I didn't care to play the game itself really. Making geometry with BSP was a revelation.

UnrealEd was improved upon in subsequent revisions. Like Unreal 3's editor.

Which was later hacked to work with Mirror's Edge since it was a UE3 game

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Surprised UT2k4's level editor hasn't been mentioned yet. It was so good for its time I bought the game to play with it even though I didn't care to play the game itself really. Making geometry with BSP was a revelation.

Weird, I did the same thing and there were probably enough people like us for Epic to notice how popular the editor itself and modding was, they later released Unreal Development Kit, basically a free Unreal Tournament with no actual game included.

 

[GethN7]

I remember Excitebike had a pretty good one for the time it released.

 

[Meaty Spaghetti]

how about the level editor in TimeSpliters, i used to make cool levels and some of the worst level for how limited it can be

 

[Regu]

Cubic Ninja.
Not because the game or even editor was any good or anything, but because it was so poorly coded that it allowed one to hack into your 3ds and run unauthorized code on it, allowing 3ds homebrew to actually happen.

 

[Meaty Spaghetti]

i forgot one game, Tenchu 2 the birth of the Stealth Assassins had a level editor for it, me and a buddy used make some interesting levels for that game and some fucked challenge maps too

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I remember Excitebike had a pretty good one for the time it released.

That one was fun but because it was ported from the disk system the saving didn't work, but the button was there and could be clicked and then it appeared like the game tried to do something before giving up, same with loading. More kids than me must have been driven nuts by that and hoped that one day a track might get saved. I know it mystified the guy that wrote the NES emulator for the original game in Excitebike 64, he could never get the save function to work so in the end he bypassed that code entirely and made a version that worked.

Mach Rider had an editor with the same broken save button for the same reason, that wasn't as frustrating though because that editor was straight up impossible to use and the game was bad.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

Halo: Reach had introduced a massive swell in its Forge mode over what Halo 3's already fantastic editor had provided.

On an unfortunate turn, Halo 4 had to have the worst level editor, in fact you had about one ceiling limit to work with for all levels and they were excruciatingly restrictive at best, infuriating to work around at worst.

 

[byuu]

Stunts.
Who didn't make their own ridiculous track that was impossible to drive through?

 

[Chaos Theorist]

Timesplitters and V Rally

 

[Stoneheart]

Even the shitty RP maps were pretty decent for the time.

Die Transe und der Drache

Ein lustiges Lied über die Liebe zwischen einem Drachen und einer Transe. Das Video kommt aus Warcraft 3, Map-Download hier: http://multimolti.com/download/s...

www.youtube.com

This is a real map with real ingame audio..

Also nobody talked about all those maps with spawning Units. the Lord of the ring one was pretty epic.

 

[KotatsuApe]

Surprised nobody mentioned valve's Hammer editor yet. Allows to create maps for every game made for the Source engine and despite being a pain to use it's extremely powerful.

Editors that I consider good are:
-GEM editor on Men of War: easy to use and has a mission scripting side that allows to create custom battles with units spawns, events, objectives...
-Zeus for Arma 3: same as above, the 3D view is good if you need precision when placing stuff around. Also the logic modules are an easy way to create game logic

 

[Haramburger]

Trick question, Duke3D is the best and everything else is bad, but if you have used other good editors or some really bad ones it would be really interesting to hear about them.

I completely agree, mucking around in that engine was extremely instructive. I actually bought the thick paperback book for it and starting buying PC Gamer with the demo discs because they had extra levels people made for awhile, with one outstanding map of a 4-city block with trucks that drove around without crashing into each other, and you could ride them and gun down others, extremely fun.

It was very interesting to see how much of the game could be edited from a plain text file, and what really blew my mind what experimenting quickly with non-euclidian spaces: you could make a square room, put an "archway" portal in the center, and walking through the east side would do nothing/see nothing, but build a room off the portal where you see a space that couldn't possibly exist walking through the west side.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I completely agree, mucking around in that engine was extremely instructive. I actually bought the thick paperback book for it and starting buying PC Gamer with the demo discs because they had extra levels people made for awhile, with one outstanding map of a 4-city block with trucks that drove around without crashing into each other, and you could ride them and gun down others, extremely fun.

It was very interesting to see how much of the game could be edited from a plain text file, and what really blew my mind what experimenting quickly with non-euclidian spaces: you could make a square room, put an "archway" portal in the center, and walking through the east side would do nothing/see nothing, but build a room off the portal where you see a space that couldn't possibly exist walking through the west side.

Doing impossible rooms/spaces in Duke3D was a lot of fun, me and my friends did some pretty cool things with it. Room over room was no problem as long as both rooms weren't visible at the same time, the raycaster can't make sense of that and it crashes the game, but we eventually created a two story house(with attic and basement) through clever and painstaking blocking of sight lines(and some other tricks) for when someone was outside looking at it. It turned out really good, it sold the illusion of being two stories.

Abusing sector effectors to make weird things was fun as well, there's no reason for this carpet NOT to flow like ocean waves and while it's not an effector there's no reason why the last boss shouldn't pop out of a thrash can.

But the best thing about the editor was that it was edit-and-play, jumping into the game was a press of a button and instantaneous, same with jumping back into the editor. It really made learning easy because it enabled you to try things just to see what happens without sinking a lot of time into it. I made some Quake maps later on but compiling the maps took so long and sometimes it error'd out because it didn't like a particular piece of geometry.

For anyone interested in Duke3D and the Build engine there's a new game called Ion Maiden built on the updated version of it. It's interesting to see what they do with it.