ROAST A MAP THREAD #NoLieJuly

Need critical opinions on your map? Want constructive advice for a specific area? Post your map and pepper your angus because there will be no sugar coated easter eggshells in this thread.

 

You want this to be assessed on its own merits right? Because it's weird looking at a ghost in the shell map that was made under a strict set of parameters.

 

As far as weight distribute goes, I think the shape of the map is good. You have a simple L design for the main road and a few pockets off to the sides that give it some bulk, which I think was a good choice.

I'm going to assume you made this for 4v4 and simply have 8 extra spawns on the map. But either way, I think the map is too sprawled out. There is a lot of dead space on the road itself, but then the bulk of the map is elevated and concentrated on the sides. In a Slayer game, I don't imagine anyone is going to want to use the road for any reason or pick up a Ghost. They'll just get teamshot from people with height advantage and cover. If the map was tighter, I know I could potentially hug the wall of a building and hide under people, but in this game they'll just spawn on the other side with a sightline onto you.

Your ramp design is good at slowing people down because none of them immediately take you to the top. However, I don't think that design applies well in this scenario since you don't want to be caught on the lower level where there isn't much cover; I would rather get from the bottom to the top faster in this case. There are a few interior spaces, but they're not very meaty and don't really get players out of the fight.

I think your design would have benefited from less horizontal playspace, beefier buildings and more elevation changes with the floor. Simply shrinking the playspace would have let you allocate more budget to building geometric design.
The geometry largely consists of 90 degree corners, so it isn't very interesting to look at even when you have detailed pieces placed around. Art is almost always contained in its shape and form. Straight corners can look good, but even then you ought to strive for trim, edging and pathways that create interesting negative shapes where there aren't any blocks (like with the skyline in your skybox).

I also don't think the elevated areas need to span the length of the map, because once you're up there (especially in Halo 5), you aren't really compelled to drop down. I'm sure an argument could be made that the players on the bottom have more options for escape, but that encounter would be far more situational. Elevating the road in one section and using the facades of your buildings to segment players in and out of them would give you a more flexible shape. It'll also let the Ghosts move around more comfortably and go up and around players without having to climb a pedestrian ramp. Right now it doesn't look very interesting to drive a Ghost around unless someone is literally toggle crouching on the bottom Stronghold.

On that note, why would anyone go to the bottom Stronghold when every area on the map can shoot on it at any given point? This is the main reason the map could use more segmentation.

The sign props suck. Use emissives and make your own. It would have let you add more local lighting to the map.

The skybox is okay. When I stand on the street in some spots, I like looking up. But the lack of sound effects and eye catching visuals on the map (whether it be signage or interesting architecture) itself makes it feel very sterile and samey throughout, and I find that the distilled nature of the actual map pulls my eye away from appreciating the skybox. The color palette is all over the place too and I think the street lights in particular are at odds with the color choice of the building. The map isn't tinted enough for such an intense yellow. Because the sky is blue and the map is "dark", it looks as though you're going for a crepuscular setting; however, the color choice doesn't really communicate that time of day to me. It just feels dirty, not dark. As expected from the guy who made sewers; I'm surprised there isn't a tunnel system on the map.

I think the biggest issue is that the map is repetitive. Your visuals, textures, lighting, prop usage and pathing are almost universal throughout the map and it doesn't feel like there is any area that will play, look or feel different from anything else. Consolidating and repurposing the layout and shrinking its horizontal playspace, distributing visual elements and colors to specific areas and creating more micro encounters that happen in isolated areas without interruption from some other side of the map would go a long way to refining the design and making it feel like a city.

That's all I can think of on my own after sitting on it for an hour.

Also your performance is aids but lolHalo5

 

Goat's dont fish and goat's don't dig so post a link.

 

I actually like the skybox. When I stand in front of the blue car and look up, I appreciate how that feels. But the fog and lighting pulls me away from it. The map's aspect ratio is less narrowly vertical than most city maps, so you need building shapes that conform with them. All that simply means is that you can get away with more repeated horizontal shapes than vertical ones.

 

Okay, for starters, the map is hideous. I mean it's obnoxiously distracting from the colors and textures down to the piece usage. Like a clown tripping on acid vomited all over your map.


Here's a quake map with a somewhat similar premise that has a far more cohesive aesthetic. Considering how old the map is, I'm not going to hold it against it, but I'll explain why I think it's important in a second.

As far as the design goes, the map is rather intricate so I cannot make any sort of accurate assessment of gameplay just by looking at it. However, based on the design of the rooms I feel like the fights in each area will end of feeling very similar. The Red and Blue rooms are slightly different shapes but functionally the same, while the Yellow Room has a bit more platforms and open areas to interact with. I would probably find the encounters there more interesting thanks to clamber, but there wont be much variation in those scenarios. You walk in the room, and then you're "in it", with one platform to jump on or one pillar to ring around, and then you ramp out of it. This is repeated in every room.

The Green area is the most isolated, most interesting and likely where I would position players to exploit the map. There are several doorways that see into here and a teleporter whose sender can be watched by the same area. Then you have two ramps that can fight with eachother that ramp over another teleporter, which I imagine you placed there to break the setup. But since that player is porting from across the map, they're punished by coming out at a bad spot, which is good. Without any pick ups on the map, I could see a team posting here effectively, and I would gravitate towards this area on the merit of it being more isolated and more interactive alone. But I wouldn't want to sit in there and lose the items.

The design makes sense functionally - I don't see a path, ramp or teleporter that isn't doing something - but then it doesn't at the same time. There is a copious amount of dead space that would benefit a game with faster movement and projectile weapons, but in Halo I see players having a very difficult time getting anywhere without constantly moving between the areas hopping through teleporters. That's obviously the intention of the map - to have players cycling to pick things up and not sit in the rooms. But again, I feel like those fights will simply be frantic and repetitive on account of there not being much else to the design. The bridge paths in the center may offer some cool side to side interactions, but for how much of the map's playspace it contains relative to how much I'd be inclined to actually use the paths, it feels more like a novelty. Like if the bridges on Prisoner were just thrown around for the sake of blocking sightlines and not actually taking you places. These these bridges do take you places, but I would find it more annoying to engage in a player clambering up a ramp for 4-8 feet of sightline protection.

Without playing the map, I think it's convoluted and repetitive. The image I linked above has more clearly defined bridges and ramps and more unique pathing. And because its aesthetic is very simple, I'm able to read its geometry more easily and identify where players can be at any given point, which I think is imperative on a map with teleporters. If that was the center of this map, I would already like it more because everything feels like has a purpose. With this however, it feels as though your goal for the map was to make it inverse symmetric, and then rearrange a few letters to scramble the word.