Post
by Nick Mame » Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:25 pm
I am reminded of badlands and gravel pit, although I saw a bit of dustbowl here and there as well. It will be curious to see how well the final and middle points will play out when they were designed for another map. I do enjoy how the window of BLU's final point was rotated to face the water, though. I sense a lot of snipers perched there in the near future.
There are too many full health and full ammo packs in the map. Their placement is also weird. It looks like you tried to place them on side paths to discourage using them during the middle of combat. But that sort of placement will lead people to abandon the point (more often than they already do) to run across the open field to that out-of-the-way corner for their health boost.
I recommend moving the full packs into the more focal points of the map. Hectic areas like the point itself where people will make a mad dash to beat their opponents and staging areas where an offense might park its medic. I'd also suggest using more medium and light pickups. Sometimes you only want a tiny health kit to bring you back to full.
The map is too flat and spacious. There are no opportunities to rocket jump in a productive way. Snipers have free reign with little cover at each point itself to provide flanking potential. Heavies are in a huge field with enemies surrounding them on all sides, lacking a wall to hide themselves against. On a whole, it heavily favors scouts and snipers.
A potential solution is to move some of the rock formations off of the map boundaries and into the map itself. Take a badlands example. Got a huge open area? Park a weird looking rock in the middle of it. Dustbowl did that, too, on the second stage. You can create artificial choke points with giant rocks and make the map feel more strategic.
As for a personal complaint, I dislike maps with those destructible pathways. It encourages two or three people to go out of their way to destroy a wall when their team desperately needs their help elsewhere. It leads to warpath2 syndrome where engineers build entire bases behind the wall, destroy it, and then utterly annihilate anything on the other side (as the poor respawnees try to jump down to get to the front). If a certain path is more advantageous than another, a one-time destructible wall will not lesson its advantages. It will just distract a team until they open it and then become the path of choice.
Those aside, I'll try to give some more concrete comments if I ever get a chance to play it on a server. Congratulations on a working release, though: I can't even work on a single project for more than a day!