Its been the general consensus that a lot of the maps or parts of the maps suffer from unfavorable design. It is not very realistic to ask for drastic re-designs, but there are a lot of ways to make these maps much more enjoyable without making it too much work on the mapping devs. With this in mind myself and bananas wanted to compile a bunch of ideas on how to have non-destructive changes in order to make the maps become more interesting and enjoyable for everyone, while dealing with existing problems we experience in testing. I’ll most likely be continually posting here with varying ideas per map. I like some of the design choices being made, but it really feels like the big issues are not being addressed and instead were just seeing boxes moved around, the one central pathway widened, and a door closed off here and there. I personally feel that there is a dire need to take advantage of a lot of the potential space on the maps that is being unused.
White Chapel v1 by INF3RN0 and Bananas
Note: Some spawn points were relocated to compliment the proposed ideas.
-
An alternate route for offense allowing them to exit from a one-way accessible drop point. This feels necessary because of how easy it is for defense to initially camp the EV from inside the garage. An aggressive defense should still be viable, however offense should have the opportunity to converge on the point from another angle.
-
The existing window should allow a player to jump through it into the garage room. This is again offering another means of entrance to the garage.
-
Widening this area is mostly in correlation with the new alt route. As a result there would be more action in this area and the extra space would be required.
-
Opening this structure would greatly decrease the repetitive and confined feeling during the EV sweep around the corner and up to the church. At the most common stopping points of the EV, the offense becomes extremely bottle necked and is forced to engage in the same exact 2 locations every time. This new area/route would simply spread the fights out more and make the escort less linear.
-
A small balcony wrap around connecting to a narrow stairwell providing a connection between these two areas would again reduce the linear repetition of this particular area. It allows for another option of approach for both offense and defense during the escort and again helps to prevent the congo line pushes that happen.
-
This is a fairly significant change in the idea behind how this objective should work. The structure shown would be the new transmit point for the captured cells and also act as a secondary objective point. As it currently stands the cell capture objectives revolve only around the capture of the cell. In the map Outskirts in ETQW the data brain objective involved the capture of the objective in one location and then the transmission in another. Both points were of interest to both the offense and defense and action took place at both locations. I can see this working again on this objective, and also effectively making the church itself feel less claustrophobic when both teams are constantly fighting between each point on the map. To prevent dense from being able to spawn camp through the transmission point, the transmit room could only be one-way accessible from the defensive side, however having it accessible from both sides would probably be more beneficial to the following escort experience to the lift (this route could also become accessible for offense after the cell objective was completed).
-
This is another significant change in the objective. What I am proposing here is the removal of all of the lift speed sub-objectives and instead having a single lift switch on the central platform. The switch could be activated by offense and deactivated by defense. The switch itself could either turn the lift on or off, or significantly speed it up when active. The platform itself would be extremely exposed with the switch in the center, making it incredibly difficult to activate. A sub-objective located at point 8 would allow offense to construct a side-objective that would activate a raised barrier around the switch objective making it less exposed. This sub objective would also be open to sabotage by the defenders. This would result in opening up the space in this particular objective and making the primary focus on a “king of the hill” object, while spreading attention to two specific areas as a means of spreading out the action. The new ramp on the side of the church would also allow another means of access to the area, giving the offense a fair amount of routes to approach the objective.
?. We were almost entirely unable to think of any way to build upon the last objective on the map. The problems however are that the whole area is incredibly close to spawns and there is no real feeling of strategical approach when it comes to delivering the objectives. Having perhaps one-cell and a less simplistic layout on this objective might be the best way to deal with it.
