Discussion: what makes a good map?

I have my own opinions about this but I'd like to hear others. Obviously Halo has had a number of well-loved maps through its three versions, and everyone has their specific favorites. I always liked Chill Out and Damnation (from CE), Lockout and Ivory Tower (from 2), and - well the jury's still out on 3. I've tried to identify what I like about these maps so I can emulate their basic traits when I build my own maps. And I wish more forgers out there did the same.

Here are the things I think are important to a flexible (non-gametype-specific), deep Halo map:

- Designated areas for offensive and defensive bases. Some maps that I like suffer from having one weak base - e.g. High Ground. It's a good map but the beach base is too easily dominated by a good team sitting on the wall and controlling the weapons.

- Multiple points of access into each play area, without overdoing it. I think three is about right for any room/area - it should be enough that a controlling team can't too easily guard them all, but not so many that you're constantly assaulted from unexpected angles no matter where you are. It should also be enough that you can't be easily pinned down in an area. This is most important for the bases; I try to have three entrances always for these rooms, unless budget or lack of space prevents it. Halo: CE maps sometimes had too few points of access which encouraged camping. Halo 2 and 3 have been better about this, though I think they went too far with Guardian - there are at least five points of access to both of the "towers" (the gold lift room and the room above the sniper rifle), which results in me spinning around like mad trying not to get snuck up on.

- Verticality. Personally I love maps that require you to look above you, and allow sneakier players to drop down from above on the less wary - Lockout and Damnation are classics in this mold, as was Prisoner. I always found the less-dimensional maps (e.g. Rat Race) to be kind of dull playing experiences. Two or three levels with plenty of interaction between them are good, but as you'll see if you look up the maps I've posted here, I like to go as high as possible. If Foundry was six stories tall I'm sure I'd be using all of it.

- Non-linearity. My favorite maps let you move between different areas with some freedom, it's not just a long slog in a straight line. This is why I'm not crazy about Narrows - man-cannons aside, it's a boring concept. Lockout was near-perfect in this aspect; Guardian is good also.

- Base separation. For various objective games the rooms or areas you've designated as bases need to take some time to move between them. If you violate this you immediately wipe out several types of games that can be played on your map. Even small maps that are good separate the bases well: think Longest/Elongation. This was Chill Out's only failing IMO - the bases were too immediately accessible to each other (especially going from the invisiblity room to the shotgun room - it was a straight shot, downhill). It made CTF less fun than it could have been.

- Variety in play area size and texture. If you have 6 rooms but they're all the same size and look the same, it's dull. If they have different sizes and looks, it quadruples the map's replay value, and makes players with different play styles happier - snipers can snipe in the large areas and straighaways, close-up guys can stay in tighter quarters with their shotguns.

- Weapon balance, weapon variety, and not too many power weapons/powerups. The first two are obvious. The third was a key to many classic maps (especially in CE) and a failing of some new maps - I don't think Bungie realized quite how much people were going to bounce between the various power weapons and deployables, or how powerful some of these weapons really were. Guardian for instance quickly because mauler/shotgun/hammer fest, before they removed the maulers from the playlists. Construct gives me the heebie jeebies online, especially in regular slayer and free for all matches, where it just turns into people camping all the lifts with one-shot-kill weapons or power drainers. When I do a forged map now the first thing I think about with weapon placement is how many power weapons I want to allow, what they will be, and how often they should respawn.

That's about all I can think of at the moment - care to add on, or comment on these ones?

 

Thanks Furious D, obviously you & I are on the same page.

You're totally right about this, especially about Foundation - all four of those corners needed another exit. Even once you were out of the room you still just had two options: left or right. It eventually wrecked a map that I enjoyed when it first came out. Battle Creek is a great example of getting it exactly right.

That's right - I think at some point when you start adding different ways to get in you almost need another level to make it interesting. Think the red base on Damnation - you had the obvious entrance from the shotgun area, but also one level down (teleporter or rocket launcher pit), two levels down (from the overshield room), and also a level above (dropping down from the sniper ledge - worked best with the crouch landing technique).

Yes, and I loved that about that map. It was a really unique design.

If you do look up my profile, check out Fractured first - I think it incorporates everything we're talking about here and turned out really well. My group had a blast on it last week. Wirerollers Inc. is a smaller and more limited map - I ended up with just two entrances to each base due to budget and space limitations. But I tried to at least offset that with a few spawns in places where you won't get instantly spawn-killed in the base on either team. I have yet to give that a group playtest - hopefully it will work out as planned. (Halo 3's spawn system is a little goofy, so sometimes it does not.)

 

Aesthetics are important definitely. I know it's hard with the limited textures on Foundry, but too many maps coming out look just alike. They just turn into this hodgepodge of boxes and walls, whatever will fit in that space at that time. I try to make my play areas look different from each other as much as possible - one room surrounded by walls, one room by boxes, one room with fence flooring and walls, etc. Whatever you can do to make it visually interesting will help people get used to it and like it.

On that front, I hope Bungie adds more objects in future Foundry-type maps. I'd like to see more textures and colors, or even lighting fixtures that would add a certain hue to the space they are placed in (a la the red light in part of Foundry). Ambitious map designers need some help making their maps look different from the horde of mediocre ones.

 

You're right, but in kind of a wrong way.   ;D  What I mean is, it IS all about gameplay, without a doubt, but aesthetics also enhance gameplay.  If you make a map that plays well but has crooked lines and things stacked poorly and a complete lack of differentiation (both between different areas of the map, and between the map as a whole vs. all other Foundry maps), then people just won't feel like playing it - and that kills gameplay, no matter how marvelous it ought to be in theory.  I've actually been struggling with this on a new map I'm working on - when I got the layout finished and exhausted my budget once again, I found that at least half the spawns left the player wondering where the hell he was and what he was looking it.  It's a very enclosed map with a lot of corridors (meaning open boxes and walls) so that's kind of natural, but you have to fight through it.  I'm about to post the finished result - hopefully I succeeded.  I find that non-traditional use of familiar scenery can help, and those A and B signs can be good friends in a time of need.

My larger hope is that the next canvas-style map Bungie releases has more varied scenery on it, and maybe even some things we can do to change the whole look (skins, lighting, whatever).  Right now what is happening on Bungie is that the Foundry maps that look distinctive are getting the most downloads - see for instance the highly popular "man-made warehouse" map, which is just a small warehouse surrounded by a fence.  Gameplay-wise it's boring as anything, but people see it and like how it looks, so they download and play it.  That's a natural reaction in a flood of fifteen thousand look-alike maps.  Some of the best maps on paper are getting some of the least attention, which is where an eye for aesthetics becomes important - you have to sell your map, not just to downloaders but also to people who may play it over and over, and need to remember what it looks like.

Obviously I agree with this completely.  It would be impossible to make the kind of maps I'm making (or trying to make anyway) on any other map but Foundry.  You can do a lot of cool things on other maps but I have not yet seen something that looked and played like an entirely different map from what it started out as (except for some of these "off or under the map" maps, which usually play badly).  The ones that feel very different tend to be smaller, gametype-specific ideas, and that's not what I'm interested in designing, personally. 

I would hope that this "unofficial guideline" about applications would stay very unofficial, and that people would be judged on the merits of their maps - whether they were made in Foundry or otherwise.  Maybe it should just be considered naturally harder to distinguish yourself with only Foundry maps - and if so, I would gladly make the attempt.

 

And that, my friends, is how to turn my fifteen paragraph ramble into one concise sentence. ;D Thanks Furious, that's exactly what I was saying.