I'm a fan of low visibility environments. I think that in making mechs more difficult to see, more gameplay opportunities arise. Flanks are easier to pull off, roaming becomes more viable, early scouting becomes more important... and most importantly - more map locations and offbeat strategies become viable because the enemy can't necessarily see you coming unless they actually properly scout it out.
For instance, on Alpine you can't do anything with your team without being spotted, which ruins a lot of options. You can't run to the south and go for a flank, you'll get spotted. You can't run to the north and go for a base cap, you'll get spotted. You can't do anything except go up to the central hill because you'll get spotted. Pretty similar on Tourmaline. From two of the spawns, you can see the entire map from one extreme end to the other and your visibility is complete unimpaired. You can't go anywhere without being spotted and you can't pull off any surprising flanks, surprise attacks, or particularly unusual strategies. In fact, one of the better strategies is to sit up on one of those spawns and camp it, from which you can see any and all enemy movements.
Viridian Bog when it was first launched had
wonderful fog. You could practically go straight down the center of the map without getting spotted, and you could certainly flank wide through the north or go all the way down through the lilypads and come out the other side. You could actually leapfrog across the plateaus on top and use your jumpjets to your advantage to shoot down on enemies without skylining yourself. It really had this sense of wonder and exploration and kept you on the edge of your seat because you couldn't keep track of where the enemy was because you couldn't see them approaching from four grid squares away. But ever since they diminished the amount of fog, you can't do any of those things without getting spotted and giving up the element of surprise. This is why I like new Forest Colony so much - the forested areas really obscure vision and the rock formations along the old shore really break up visibility and allow for water strategies. There's enough fog in the forest to obscure entire company movements and it makes brawling a lot more exciting because you never know when something is going to hit you from a flank because you can't see it coming. It's a lot more fun that way.
I adore the new visibility on Caustic - it really does make mechs super hard to see, which in theory should open up a lot more possibilities. But any hope of strategical variety is stifled by the overdone rocks around the center crater that make it nothing but a Nascar fest with shin-bruising obstacles. But what I really like most about Caustic right now is that the vision modes are truly unique. Heat vision is great on it, because beyond a certain range, all mechs appear as obnoxious black dots that are super easy to spot, but the terrain is harder to navigate. Night amplification makes the terrain easier to see and better lights up mechs at close range. Normal vision is kinda in between. None of the viewmodes on this map are really better than any other, and I wish it was like this on all other maps. For instance, on Forest Colony, perma-thermal is pretty much OP unless you're fighting at range. Same goes for River City, Viridian Bog, Mining Collective, HPG, Portico, Taiga, and probably more.
People who constantly whine about visibility and want PerfectVision and Sunshiny Days on every single map must realise that it tends to drastically simplify gameplay. Look at World of Tanks, for instance. Perfect vision on every map because that's what people wanted, so the solution was to make tanks literally invisible if they weren't within spotting distance so they wouldn't shoot each other from spawn (sound familiar?). Literally invisible. The same effect could have been achieved through careful map design and reasonable optical obstructions where needed, but no... they wanted unblemished visibility so now they're stuck with tanks that pop into and out of existence based on whether you're "supposed" to be able to see them, which I find incredibly lame.
Edited by Tarogato, 27 October 2015 - 07:03 AM.
5
. So I guess everything is fine then 
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