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TL:DR; Maps with gentler terrain and more open spaces would really change the game up.
Think about previous Mechwarrior titles and the favorite weapon configurations you always see in retrospective videos. What are they? PPC, Gauss, large lasers, and LRMs, almost exclusively (depending on the title played). Why are these "metas" preferable? Because the maps in those titles are largely flat, open terrain with no cover, ensuring that brawlers will get torn up by long-range weaponry before they can close to the effective range of their short-range weapons.
One of PGI's underrated successes has been to avoid this with MWO's map design. It's the first major title to feature maps with plentiful cover, allowing smart brawlers to close and engage if they know how to use the terrain right. It also prevents matches from devolving into endless circle-strafing. Things are imbalanced in favor of laser meta, but map design is still a factor in map balance, and MWO's philosophy allows the conditions for balance to exist once the numbers are sorted out.
In addition, PGI has been learning. The most recent maps - Collective, Bog, the CW maps, and the revamps of River City and Forest Colony, have their problems. But they're mostly relegated to poor gamemode design. Each of these maps has a marked advantage over previous maps: they have made terrain and obstacles so dense that we get a wide variety of movement, stealth, and engagements, making "sneak attacks" by brawlers and peeking by scouts an even bigger part of the game and further restraining wild long-range meta (unless you play stupid).
This map design philosophy was amongst PGI's earliest design pillars, and one that they've benefited the game by adhering to. (If you don't see this, just imagine the current game with MW2 maps. Ugh.) However, it comes with a cost in four areas: development time, learning curve, gameplay variety, and realism.
1. Development time. I won't pull a VictorMorson and pretend to know all about maps. I have no idea how much of my experience in CounterStrike mapmaking can apply to CryEngine. However, I cannot help but think that the sheer number of objects, assets, and wildly varying terrain employed to break up the long-range meta is drastically adding on to the time it takes to create an MWO map. It all has to be added, and then it has to be combed over for stuck bugs, FPS sinks, texture matching, collision hulls, and all that good stuff. It's more time spent at every level, from design to implementation to QA.
Disclaimer: People with more dev experience than me have since mentioned that cutting down on this occlusion wouldn't necessarily cut down on dev time.
2. Learning curve. While the hardcores love it, I posit that new players would have an easier time learning this game on flat terrain. I personally would love a nice simple circle-strafing session every (long) once in a while. I know that varying elevation makes Battlemechs' pitch angles a factor and deepens the gameplay. But we've got maps that follow that philosophy already. What if we could bring back more level play without tilting the meta?
3. Gameplay variety. The real problem with PGI's strategy of "dense terrain to balance the game" is that they've gone too far and turned certain maps into all lanes. This makes flanks obvious, peeks well-known, and gameplay extremely limited. It's a big part of why the game feels so stale and repetitive, in addition to gamemode issues.
4. Realism. Too few of the maps feel like an actual place. Not everything is highly mountainous, divided into confining lanes, and convenient for brawlers. Some physical locations are wide open.
What I'd like to see is a shakeup of PGI's map design philosophy. Move towards more uniform terrain that doesn't channel mech movements into inevitable lanes. Again, some of the CW maps hint at this in places. But there's always some disproportionately massive peak or mountain that comes along and makes much of the map intraversable or unfavorable. Whittle those down. Increase the amount of paths that can be safely taken.
This can be done a few ways:
Rely on gently rolling terrain across most of the map, using larger stuff only as sparse visual orientation rather than barriers. Some MWLL maps excelled at this. Here are three similar ideas from the real world. They'll want to spice that last one up so it doesn't look like friggin' Indiana after a nuclear war, but hopefully you get the point: terrain is no longer a hard limit but a soft limit. Taking the low ground helps conceal you, but if you want to take a lance across high ground for a surprise flank, you can do so as long as you're willing to give away your general location and maybe catch a stray gauss round. Choices! Freedom! Power to the people! Rah.
Give us wide-open spaces and use trees, foliage, and atmospheric effects (haze, fog, temporary dust/snow storms) to mitigate long-range fire. Again, MWLL was great at this. You still had long-range fire there, but obstacles and haze prevented you from seeing whether your quarry was behind a rock or not. It made things interesting.
Give us totally flat terrain and break it up with sparsely but strategically placed rocks and structures. Once again, a triumph of MWLL, which had great sense for what military installations should look like without funneling everything into one or two damn paths. Now obviously, this would be too open for MWO. LRM/Gauss/PPCapalooza, goodnight brawlers. But raise up just a couple of little hills, plop down just a couple of rocks, and you'd be surprised how much ground an Atlas can cover without being PPCed apart.
Take away the box canyons. PGI, you have no idea how cramped the maps feel because of those glaringly obvious HERE'S THE EDGE OF THE MAP YOU IDIOTS cliffs - and, conversely, how much bigger the maps will feel without them, without actually making the maps themselves bigger. I know you have to think of your dumbest gamers when you design stuff. But I really do think the minimap and "out of bounds" warning will serve to keep people in-bounds. Canyons aren't necessary, and they feel artificial.
Benefits of this approach?
* Increased gameplay variety. Softer terrain-based limits on movement means flanks can come more easily, scouts have a bigger role, and choices are increased. You'd also see more waypoints set by team commanders and hear more "further north, then come west" or "500m at bearing 290 degrees" than the endless "uhhhh, go around that corner" that we have now. More tactically immersive game, hopefully. Again, PGI has already largely accomplished this with the more recent maps; I'm just talking about using terrain to do it instead of buildings and...Bog stuff.
* The maps might feel like actual places.
* Newbies might find it easier to learn on these maps.
I also want to emphasize that the best place to implement this new approach is probably the new Community Warfare maps. I don't personally like the way the regular maps are designed to funnel players straight to the action, but I can appreciate that those maps aren't intended for me but for the "quick action" players. Since CW is the "hardcore" mode, it makes sense to invest the tactics there.
What does everyone else think? Would you be willing to support CW maps with somewhat simpler terrain if these benefits would result? DO you think those benefits would result?
Edited by Rebas Kradd, 10 September 2015 - 10:47 AM.
