Novus

Novus is absolutely gorgeous! A nice layout and the different sections of the map are very well defined. Looks as if it would be fairly easy to navigate, which has been a big problem for me when playing most forged maps. It can be easy to loose your sense of where you are in the map, I don't see this as being the case with Novus. Gonna have to try this one out for sure.

p.s... I love that rocket launcher ordinance drop extraction contraption.

 

I played no sprint TS on Novus with my test lobby last night and took a look at it again in theater this morning. I am going to outline my feedback in bullet form.

• Novus is over-scaled for 4v4 and has huge amounts of segmentation. Traversing the map was slow and it took a long time to find enemy players. After several minutes of play there were only 15 kills put on the board, and had both teams been playing conservatively it would have been far less. I think the entire map needs to be scaled down and opened up.
• The map is scaled for sprint and has no defined flow. There are too many movement options and escape routes in the middle of the map, which combined with the excessive segmentation creates a swiss cheese effect. Random gameplay.
• The entirety of red/orange side is very cluttered. Movement is impeded by thin routes and objects placed too close to each other. I think the entire red base needs to be reforged with more defined structure and less clutter.
• There is a steep brace large piece used as a ramp in orange that does not connect with the platform it leads to. Players are forced to jump once they reach the top which is unnecessary. That entire ramp structure can be reworked to have hard connections.
• Much of the forging and connections were sloppy. I remember hitting several bumps moving on to the brace large catwalks.
• The forging is blocky with little interesting geometry and therefore comes off as a generic forge map. Try to implement some curving or angled geometry in the middle of the map to break up the square feel.
• Novus for the most part is a sea of white. White walls and white floors. Contrast is very minimal except for the rock tunnel and outer rim, and personally I think this map should be reforged from the ground up using the natural forge island terrain as flooring in some areas. The green would provide contrast to all of the white piece usage and improve the map aesthetically in my opinion.

 

I disagree and I have to say that I have enjoyed every game I have played on here. But that's just from a layman's view point.

 

Looking forward to seeing what changes you decide to make. If you need any further explanation on any of the points I brought up you know how to contact me. At the end of the day the feedback from the testing lobby is just that - feedback, and it is entirely up to you which feedback to accept and which feedback to dismiss. You submitted your map for testing in a competitive test lobby where all testers are competitive players and forgers, so if this is your first time receiving feedback from such a lobby then most of this may seem foreign. Our expectations of maps are very high and every tiny issue gets amplified when each person in the lobby knows what to be looking for.

 

The whole map is flat for the most part in its current state. However, using the anvil and then implementing height variation in different areas of the map either through rock terrain or blocks would solve that problem. I quickly outlined a few things on your overview picture just to give you an idea. The area within the green square is where there is too much white and where the use of the anvil would add needed contrast. The area within each red square is where there is too much clutter - you will notice there is a pattern. Those pillars you placed in each of those routes create very cramped dance floors, sometimes only a unit wide on either side or less.

 

I agree with Fated on the cover in gold and red. The Platform XL's in red can simply be removed. I really don't think you need any cover there at all. If it turns out that you do need cover, use something significantly smaller so there's more room to strafe.
In gold, I would remove the 3 Ramp Shallow pillars. They look cool, but it's more cover than you need, and again, more strafing room would be beneficial. What I would do instead is place a pillar underneath the bridge. That will be sufficient cover. I would then move your tele 2 units towards red (right next to where it currently is, where you have a 2X4 Block right now). Then I would move your lower level entrance into the middle of the map over so it's lined up with the new tele position.
I don't see any particular thing that's 'game breaking', which is good, but there are a lot of little things I would change on this map. Changing each of those little things would result in some major changes, like you'd basically be rebuilding the whole map by the time you were done. What I'd really like to do is run through this with you in forge and explain which areas I would change and why, and then let you decide how to proceed from there.
I'll send a friend request, and maybe we can meet up some time this weekend.

 

Maybe you just try whichever you like best, and see how it works. If you don't like it, you can try the other option presented to you. That's how I see it anyway.

 

IMO, red needs more work than blue. The large platform right outside of its base has too much power and advantageous LoS. If the blue team successfully set up on that position, I feel like they would easily spawn trap and dominate red team (under the assumption that an objective game is being played). As I mentioned back on THC, I think it would be beneficial to focus on incorporating power directly into red base by 1. allowing players to gain a significant height advantage within the base or 2. creating a route that breaks the LoS between the aforementioned platform and allows players to move out of the base unseen. I don't expect these to be used as they are some pretty large changes, but here's an example of what I meant earlier (Green being route additions, Orange being structural additions):



I'll refrain from say too much else as I have yet to play the map, but Fated brought up a good point about the flow. Looking back at older dev maps, they generally have defined routing (figure-8 usually) as to make movement less sporadic. Although those designs also have strong structural cohesion, I would attempt to incorporate it here if you can.

Spoiler

I imagine I've told you this several times now, but I'll try to get a game on here soon to give you some more indepth feedback, mang.

 

Follow Audi's advice. Conflicting feedback is very common. Even when you have 2 people playing on the same team in the same match, they are both going to have different experiences within that match and different observations. This can result in widely varying, sometimes contradicting, feedback. You just need to trust your own judgment. This is where it becomes essential to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish with your map.

Prior to building a map, there are a lot of things I think about... How fast paced do I want it to play? Do I want to focus on a particular type of combat (close/medium/long range battles)? Do I want it to play a particular gametype well? Do I want to cater towards a particular weapons set? It's good to be clear about what you want from a map from the very beginning, as it will help make decisions simpler down the line. Now would be a good time for you to clarify, at least for yourself, what you want from this map. Then you can decide which changes are appropriate.

The focus of my feedback will not be on improving how this particular map plays. My focus will be more on the general level, and geared towards building an understanding of basic principles that can be applied to any map. I will go through things like how to plan and build connections that promote a smooth flow, or how to use map shape, elevation, and geometry to create good sightlines without the need for lazy cover. I'll simply be using this map to demonstrate these ideas.

 

In regards to design, its difficult for me to understand where you're trying to lead your players. You want a team to be able to control the map. The routes feel random at times and its not possible to "set up" due to the segmentation and numerous routes. Map control/positioning is important when designing a map, it actually brings an objective to slayer games. By creating map positioning advantages, you're giving players something to work towards throughout the course of the match and rewarding them for achieving it. I would suggest promoting this map for objective gameplay to help organize player movement. This might be a great map for FFA too but you have to revisit your spawns and weapon placement. For example, delete the initial spawns pointing towards rockets. For this being such a sniper dominant map, try placing the weapon in a less rewarding area. Player choices remain top heavy with little influence to entice players to travel on the bottom of the map other than the rocket launcher and sticky det. Both of which are relatively close to each other. Bottom gold is a good spot for a weapon. Delete all of the spawns on top of the open bridges and walkways and place them in less visible locations (nooks on bottom areas of the map). Most battles will occur on the top of the map due to height advantage. That being said, player engagements will seem long, flat and straight at times. You can address this by adding more differentiation to your verticality. The entrance from top gold to green is a nice elevational change that I would like to experience more. Hope this helps, there's more to say which makes it difficult to leave feedback sometimes because its incomplete but I'll check back here later.

 

Yes, bring your weapons to the bottom floor of your map. You need to supply respawning players with ammunition to challenge the players up top. If it were my decision, I would place rockets bottom gold because of the set up possible from both sides of the map. Top Red and top Gold become two dividing platforms to support your teammates going for rockets.

Start by addressing one of your longest sight lines: top Gold/Green intersection towards Red initial spawn area. There are two ways to fix this. You could break up the sight line with an elevational change between the two points or by breaking up the linearity of the path.

 

There's really a lot to explain and I'd like to do it in detail, can you invite me to a forge session? GT: WARH0LIC

 

So, I have some feedback for you. The other guys are doing a good job of pointing out some of the overarching issues you can still smooth out, so I'm going to come at this from a different angle. I only went through the gold section of the map, and made a bunch of alterations. I put an edited version in my fileshare so you can get a first hand look at some of the things I'm about to explain. Keep in mind that I wasn't thinking at all about how the changes I made would fit in with the rest of the map. I'm not expecting you to keep the changes and adjust the rest of the map to fit them. I just made them as a way to demonstrate some of the small details you can improve upon throughout the map.
I'm just gonna go through these like bullet points...

- Your teleporter sender (gold) and receiver (blue) were both positioned backwards. This results in a stutter when you pass through it. The pointy side of the teleporters signify the direction the player should enter and exit from.

- Remember that the ends of Coliseum Walls have an invisible lip on them. In some of the areas where you used them for flooring, the ramps that were connected to them were sitting too low, which caused a noticeable bump when I walked over them.

- Do not lead players into the side of a ramp. For example, if you head towards red from where the gold teleporter is, right at the bottom of the first ramp is another ramp going a different direction. That second ramp interrupts the players movement. It's basically always possible to avoid this if you plan ahead.

- Do not leave the ends of ramps protruding into walkways. This is basically the same point as the last one but I wanted to make sure it got covered. The very first pic in your first post is a perfect example of this. Directly under the slayer symbol you can see a ramp that extends out into the main walkway. Avoid this at all costs. Again, this is pretty easy to avoid with a little bit of planning.

- Spawning. Need more spawns on lower levels, fewer on upper levels. Mid level spawns are okay in moderation, but players should never spawn in power positions. Make players work for the height advantage.

- Power Weapons. Power weapons should not be located in power positions. Force players to choose between height advantage or firepower advantage. Don't give them both at the same time. Also, my feeling is that if you have to set the spawn time for a weapon to anything longer than 3 minutes, then the weapon should not be on the map because it's overpowered. The Sniper should be fine at a three minutes respawn rate on this map. Also, Initial Ordnance takes 4 seconds to drop. Always set the time on your Initial Ordnance's 4 seconds faster than when you want it to spawn. I set the Sniper at 176 seconds so that it will actually spawn every 180 seconds (3 minutes).

- Colors. Maps tend to look better if coloring is not overdone. Color a few items that will catch players eyes, but there's no need to color every piece. What I personally do, generally speaking, is color the vertical pieces (walls/pillars), and leave ramps and floors uncolored, with a few exceptions here and there.

- Piece usage. It's inconsistent. A more consistent visual theme = a more attractive looking map.


Overall, from what I can tell, this is a big improvement over the previous version. The main thing I noticed is less clutter, which is definitely a good thing.
One thing that I didn't address that I would like to see is a larger difference between the lowest level and the second level of the map. Looking at the first pic in your first post again, I would say that those coliseum walls for flooring are your second level. You've already added some height variation in that area on the new version, but the difference between your second level and your ground level is less than I would prefer it to be. Also, a good portion of the map is at that 2nd level. I'd like to see more variation both overall, and within each section of the map. In other words, you would be better off with more dance floor at elevations that lie somewhere between your lowest and highest levels. Right now you basically have 2 levels, with minor elevation differences within each of those levels. More variance would be better, with a larger amount of dance floor in that in-between area.

That's all I have for you right now. I may come back with more at a later date.

 

What is your reasoning for wanting respawns on the top level of your map?
If someone dies, they should be at a disadvantage when they respawn. Spawning people up top creates the possibility of respawning with an advantage over the person/team that just killed them. A player should basically never be better off dying, and putting respawns up top means there's a good chance that could happen. In a Slayer game it may not have an enormous impact on the game. However, on an objective game where map positioning is far more important than the amount of kills or deaths you have, it could have a major negative impact.
So unless you have a really good reason for wanting them there, I would strongly recommend against doing so.