- SentientGiraffe
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- Exalted Heroic Member
Well they created a game that limits their map design, and then they make personal guidelines that limit their map design further. They removed the mid-to-long-range weapon from the game. That makes the sniper rifle too powerful in open areas. So, they have to limit open areas.
They break the teleporters so you're always facing forward when exiting the receiver. Avalanche seems to have been built to work around this, but they refuse to use teleporters in anything but remakes (or reimaginations) and special map variants anyway. They opt to replace them with man cannons and energy lifts, which are just line of sight transport devices. That drastically limits map design. Try to create something like Rat Race, Chill Out, or Chiron with something like that.
They remove fall damage, which, in my opinion, makes multi-level maps much less interesting. Boarding Action, Damnation, and even Hang 'em High aren't going to be nearly as interesting without fall damage. Look at Tombstone, or look at Construct.
They're artists who want to create pretty environments, rather than map creators who want to make good gameplay. They feel the need to create distant scenery, and make maps that better accommodate that desire, even though that scenery has no gameplay benefit at all. So, rather than having real map geometry to serve as barriers, we have cliffs (or similar, less natural structures) or invisible walls at the edge of the maps.
We're left with artists, rather than real map designers, working on a more limited game, while limiting themselves further with personal guidelines. It's a wonder that they can produce anything worthwhile. At least with remakes (Cold Storage), they might overlook some of those guidelines.