Of course the small scale can affect how your general layout will play. Colosseum in H5 is a 2b2t that plays like a linear map because the Rocket Tower is so exposed and open that everyone just piles in the snipe side of the map and pushes. The small scale stuff emphasizes exactly how much your map will play a certain way; it can emphasize an already prominent trait or it can fight against it. That's besides the point. Of course it's not superficial. If I knocked out all the geo in Angst except the walls dividing the rooms and fill each room with ramps at different angles and mess with everything inside the room; how much will the map change? Very little, especially in the context of room based maps which seem to be your specialty. The dividing walls and shape remain the same, you're just changing the exact playground within the rooms themselves. In a hyperbolic example sure you can totally flip the balance of one room to the next, but everything not directly touching it remains in tact. It's why room based maps are so easy to build, the sight lines are so controlled that you can completely redesign a single room and not affect the rest of the map at all in a lot of circumstances. Open air maps dont' have that luxury, you could change the height of a single platform and **** the entire balance of the map but I digress. High Guard and Optic prison DO play alike, extremely similar. The biggest difference outside of visual fidelity between the two maps is that High Guard has way more interesting sightlines both across, and within the same side of your map. Which is the entire character of dueling sides maps; How well can you fight across the gap and how well can you fight on your own side. Which is why High Guard is the best map within this principle I think I've ever seen. Boarding Action was almost completely shooting across and it was ridiculous. Bungie saw this and made sword base which was closed off so much that you pretty much never shot across because no one was ever stupid enough to stand in the tiny doors and die to it. It was a camp fest. Optic Prison remedied this by having a good balance of both. High Guard took it to the next level by having intricate playspaces within each side that were fun to fight in, in comparison to the straight hallways of Optic Prison. OF COURSE they play alike, and any differences come from how the small scale composition was done. I'm not going to given and saying "Holy **** dude how did you come up with this crazy side vs side concept!" because it's not creative. But how he went about it was very tactfully done. (On the comment of the endless pathways on High Guard; I believe Given had it more room based originally with lots of playgrounds to fight in but it was too hard to flush people out from across the map. He killed most of the dancefloors and went with the catwalks because it keeps people moving; no great place to stop and hunker down. It's definitely a great design choice I think he made because it allows you to flush paths very well) "I'm not saying Cobalt is a bad map, but I don't understand how you lump room-based maps together as "Reach maps", but this doesn't fit that description. I can't help but feel your just being nice to Xandrith here. And I'm sure he'll think I'm trying to give him a hard time, but I'm not." Because a majority of room based maps in Reach did look like the same exact thing. Some small jumble of rooms placed together side by side slightly offset. I can look at any map like that and get a good understanding of exactly how it will play within a minute or so. There's nothing to them, and shows very little creativity in the way of designing the actual layout of your map. When people say "layout" they're not talking about the cool windy little paths on Oblivion or the holes you can drop into. They're talking about the shape of the map. But Cobalt isn't that different, that's why I said it's my biggest knock on the map. The shape of Cobalt is a pretty direct rip of Chillout and plenty of other room based maps that have followed it. The ONE thing that sets it apart is how he did the design in the small scale. http://i.imgur.com/kEb1BQw.png This portion of the map is the best example. To even escape this room, a player has to run to the back of the room, jump up a ledge, and then wrap around a path that puts them out into the double pillar room. Because this path is so convuluted and has the window slit in the wall it makes it very hard to escape if you don't make the preemptive decision to take that path ahead of time. Which is great, because room based maps generally play like **** in Halo 5. It's hard to flush rooms with nades because of thruster and the second you push the other team uses the bullshit abilities to run away and reset the fight. You can't do that in this room BECAUSE Xandrith made the conscious choice the convolute the path. If you don't make the decision ahead of time that you're going to leave, then you're going to stay and fight. That's a great example of small scale stuff that sets this map apart and makes it fun to play. Very few other people would have made that design decision or even thought of it; and it's reflected in every part of Cobalt. You can't run away very easily because the small scale stuff is designed to slow you down; as it should. If he hadn't made those decisions to make interesting pathing then the map would be a generic sack of **** and he knows it. I know it. And everyone knows it. Because the actual layout and shape of the map is played out and proven. It's a sequence of rooms around a larger center. "Yes, Angst has some interesting LoS, useful alternative movement options, varied vertical interactions, and even a one way drop down. It has all of those things." When I look at it I don't see those things. I see an extremely safe and proven layout with very uninteresting connections. Very uninteresting pathing. To me, it just looks like something that quite literally anyone could have done. That is my immediate perception of it. Yeah, it works. But for anyone that has been forging as long as you and I have been, making a map work is a given. Seriously it's not hard to make things "work" and that shouldn't be the goal. "So, here's another example of our differences. Again, try not to take offense, but those things that you like about Oblivion are basically why I don't like playing it. The one word I would use to describe my experience is "awkward". The high cave area I was talking to you about, the terrain sloping inward, the very steep hill climb, the ramps with a gap between them for some reason, the rocks in the lava that have invisible blockers on them, the two different methods of getting to high cave from the coffin room where you have to jump twice. It's just not a smooth experience. I'm not trying to say you shouldn't be proud or anything. I just want to give you my perspective, and how I look at maps." Right, and that's fine. I just have never understood what "awkward" even means lol like how can something even be awkward. When I go to work to make Call of Duty maps and my boss looks at my map and sees a sniper tower that honestly isn't even that high and goes "Dude that's way too tall players don't want to look up like that" I go "Why." Boss "Because it's just awkward" Me "Why" Boss "Because it just is people aren't used to it. Make it shorter" And that's the gist of the people I work with. They are so close minded and stuck in their comfort zones ways that the smallest thing makes them uncomfortable. Anything in level design is only as awkward as you let it make you feel. The terrain slopping towards the death pit shouldn't feel awkward to you, it's LITERALLY just geometry at an angle. That's it, why should that make you feel awkard lol. It has utility in grenade bounces, utility in keeping you from backing out of a fight, and perception in making you anxious. It fills so many powerful roles in level design and to write it off as "ehhhh I feel weird" is insanely close minded. The ramp in the tower with a hole is one of the coolest parts of the map I thought, you could keep climbing up or just drop straight down into the tele. It punishes bad pushes, allows you to flank on the fly, and do so many things if you just accept it for what it is. It's like when Squally wrote off Trinity in H2A because the ramps were 40/45 degrees. Like what the **** ahahaha what a ridiculous arbitrary stupid ****ing rule to limit yourself by (not saying you follow this, but the principle is there). The same goes for the Legion tele; That SHOULDN'T make you feel uncomfortable it's just a new experience that comes with it's caveats. The second you start writing things off because they're awkward is the second you stop experiencing awesome things in level design. I could look at the spiral staircase in Storm Peaks that climbs 5 stories and call it "awkward" because I have to look up the whole time, or I could go "Wow, that's badass. This has a lot of good utility in shooting straight up and straight down and allowing vertical movement in a very small space." Sometimes discomfort or the inability to do something is a balancing tool and there's nothing wrong with that. When you get knocked out of the top Labrynth in Oblivion, you can't just hop back into it and keep fighting because it is so high above the chapel. If I had made it a smooth "not awkward" transition back into the top people would just diddle the boundary and never die. It's a hard punishment. Your reaction to that should be "wow I got knocked out and it's hard to get back in, that's fair" not "wow it's hard to get back up that makes me feel awkward". I hope this all makes sense. And sure, make a 2b2t that stands out, I'm all for it. But even if you create incredible pathing and unique characteristics to the map it's still going to resemble a layout that you didn't come up with on your own. You yourself said Cobalt is just based off Chill out - which it is. That alone makes the layout less impressive. He didn't come up with the shape. The feat is in making something unique within the shape. If you can come up with a unique layout and great things within that layout then you've struck gold. And obviously there's no hard line between what defines the large scale layout and what defines the small scale pathing, they blend together a lot. But the principle I hope is clear.
I like this thread better when we get constructive discussion instead of calling each other ****ing idiots/retarded. --- Double Post Merged, Jul 2, 2017 --- Does anyone have a 2v2 block out they are not using?
I'm putting together a small-scale tower blockout soon, but it's MINE MINE MINE This one that I posted a while ago
nobody likes you --- Double Post Merged, Jul 2, 2017 --- hahaha good luck getting multi to understand that
I do. If you can show me your work, and I like what I see, I'll let you do the art. Multi I'll respond to that later.
Unless Ben Shapiro can provide statistics to prove this, I'm just gonna go ahead and call this subjective.