In Halo 2 the community had Lockout, and in Halo 3 we had Guardian, but in Reach there isn't a map that has the essential components that made those maps great. Our goal in creating Circulation was to offer such a map. Circulation offers many elements that you know and love from both Lockout and Guardian (maybe a little spice from Ascension). It includes three levels of gameplay. The levels are long range between the towers; mid range in the bases, the Green House and the middle; and finally close range on the bottom level and in the tunnel. All these key aspects of Guardian and Lockout forge together in an all new way. One which will conjure nostalgia and present a refreshing experience. Big Base Small Base The Green House The Tunnel with Lift When playing Guardian, we really enjoyed the aspect of gameplay that the man-cannons brought to the level. With that in mind, we created the Lift Area. If you reach this area you will be able to soar to a multitude of different locations of the map. Lift Area from Middle Lift Landing Locations
This is a really nice looking Guardian/Lockout re-imagination, although it definitely isn't the first to appear, not even on Forge Hub. I like the Lift Area idea, I have seen something similar, but to a lesser extent on two maps before this, one was Empire by Codyr2391, and the name of the other one is escaping me. Oh well. Clearly, the lift on Empire is more isolated from the middle than your lift, and has less lifts. Your Lift Area transports people to the bases, which may be an issue in CTF or other team based games that force to to defend a certain area, as it may introduce too much map flow and make some areas to difficult to defend. Your Lift Area, in comparison to Guardian, is different. That is because instead of separating the two lifts that lead to each base on opposite sides of the map, you put them together and connected it to the middle, when only one of Guardian's lifts was accessible from the middle. While your Lift Area idea varies from that of Guardians, I think that it improves upon it because of how it is positioned on ground lower than the middle, making it a vulnerable place to go to, but rewarding because it can bring you to one of the bases. This demonstrates really good RvR, and I must say, this is a nice Lockout re-imagination, definitely worth a download. I like how you managed to incorporate aspects of Guardian into a Lockout-ish design, you seemed to do it way better than in my map Champion, which took Lockout and redesigned it as an inverse symmetrical map with aspects of Guardian added to it.
I have to say this map has incorporated many of the better aspects of Lockout and Guardian and is overall a pretty good map. While walking around I noticed a few places with some glitchy rendering, one on the border of the orange and green regions by the back platform and another on the two phased platfrom Y's on top of the orange base. I'm sure some slight coordinate bumping would solve the problem. I was also thinking if moving the shotgun farther down the tunnel would make its position more noticeable because I almost walked right past it the first time. Finally, in the gravity lift at the end of the shotgun tunnel there are 2 one way shield but it seems like only 1 of them is necessary. Any particular reason why you added the lower one? Aesthetics perhaps?
Hey Antares, Thanks for your review. You're right about the Lift Area, it can cause a very quick CTF game. We are still testing initial spawn/capture points for CTF to see if we can make the game longer. The problem with these size maps is that they usually have fast objective game such as CTF or Assault. [br][/br]Edited by merge: Thanks PH03NIX for pointing out that glitchy rendering, and we're definitely going to move that shotgun spawn. As for the shield doors: the top one prevents falling into the lift (which could lead to getting stuck), and the bottom prevents having a sticky grenade endlessly go up and down the lift.