Would "realistic" buildings be more fun?

[Greycat]

Before getting started on this - yes, this would require new maps, creating spawn points, testing, etc. I'm not asking about the feasibility of that. Yes, it would be a lot of work if the dev team chose to do this. So let's skip that part of the argument - it's really not related to what I'm asking.

 

I think everyone's talked/joked/griped about the "insane architect" when going through city building maps. Giant, oddly sprawled out floors, going up to a tiny "S" hallway between two elevators, to another floor in a totally different orientation and so forth.  Or warehouses that would be utterly *impractical* as warehouses.

 

What if one (or more) devs got a wild hair and said "Guess what, we're going to make these more realistic inside!" Would it be more or less fun? More or less interesting?

 

I mean, I have two "first reactions." One is that it would be fun to have the new maps. Things would *not* be where you expect. You'd have to learn everything again.

 

The other, possibly a first reaction, would be "so... big, rectangular maps with some shelves or cubicles? Meh."

 

However, thinking about it... they wouldn't be. Office buildings and warehouses both get split up in unique ways. Yes, some are "open" with just desks everywhere (and we get a taste of that in some Praetorian lab rooms, actually.) Others get split up in some fairly interesting (and, sometimes, mazelike in their own right) ways. With offices, shared floors between companies, more- and less-secure areas, different departments having different needs, transitioning from a cube farm to the C-level office suites - heck, some could even have public "first floors" with areas for lunch and shopping (all with their *own* layouts, hiding spots and the like.)

 

Warehouses, despite maybe being the more boring sounding of the two, could be even more diverse. Warehouses, after all, get rented and used for all sorts of things, from the obvious (storage/inventory) to office space of their own (some youtubers, for instance, convert warehouse space into studios.) A "warehouse" could even be a hangar (shown in game,) and some of those even have homes built in. We even have one in Talos with a portal in it. Given our tech (and magic) groups, a warehouse could be even more of a blank canvas.

 

Having "realistic" maps - which would, I would think, be constrained more to size and consistency (and things like elevator placement...) - could be more fun, in the sense of letting you get drawn just that little bit more into the world.

 

Granted, the crazy architect would be out of work, but I hear he wanted to design roundabouts and hedge mazes anyway...

 

Would you find these "more realistic" maps more or less fun? What would you do with them?

 

( ... secondary thought, here. Having "warehouse" be a default base type and letting you work inside constraints could kick off some base building - both in terms of an easy start for those who don't want to do as much work, and a challenge for those who want to see how far they can go with it.)

[GraspingVileTerror]

I've often wished that maps were built with more of an eye toward the holistic and diegetically appropriate, rather than the hodge-podge of building blocks taped together at (seemingly) random that we have.

 

But that would also necessitate a change to the pacing and the gameplay that we have.  Maps right now are more like gauntlets or snipe-hunts, depending on their design.  If the maps were more "realistic" then I think we would also need to adjust how they played out.  Especially with the likes of the Travel Powers.

 

As usual, this is also probably one of those situations where "leave the old stuff untouched" is the smart move.  If the current or future Devs want to make maps that fit in time and space more appropriately, then I recommend they do so with future content, and leave the Escheresque monstrousities of past content in tact.

[Greycat]

18 minutes ago, GraspingVileTerror said:

But that would also necessitate a change to the pacing and the gameplay that we have.  Maps right now are more like gauntlets or snipe-hunts, depending on their design.  If the maps were more "realistic" then I think we would also need to adjust how they played out.  Especially with the likes of the Travel Powers.

 

But would they?

 

I've mentioned the Praetorian lab maps. While not "realistic," the individual rooms I don't think really affect pacing and gameplay when you hit the larger, open rooms with desks and devices (liquid tubes, computers, etc.) in them.

 

This is the same sort of thing that would happen in the sort of "realistic" maps I'm talking about. Obstacles wouldn't be "was he drunk driving down a twisty mountain road when he designed this" hallways - they'd be the more natural feeling walls, cubes, dividers, file cabinets, server racks or what have you. They can still get somewhat mazelike (let's not get into when I worked at lockheed martin...) after all.

 

(And again. Not really looking at "*should* the devs do this," but "would your experience improve/not/get worse" with this sort of thing... which is why I only quoted this section.)

[Darmian]

I just want an apartment building with rooms or a house or a hotel. There are Hotel Genevas everywhere. Lobby reception entrance and elevator access to floors - only the ones you need - rooms. Whatever. All the existing stuff is actually fine.

[GraspingVileTerror]

There are too many factors at play to say if it would improve my overall experience, I think.  The realism factor for the structure of the maps alone aren't the be-all and end-all of the equation.  If the maps were changed without an eye for game design and were strictly changed for realism, I might be more satisfied on the roleplay/narrative side of things, but I think the gameplay pacing would suffer.

[Luminara]

16 minutes ago, Greycat said:

I think everyone's talked/joked/griped about the "insane architect" when going through city building maps. Giant, oddly sprawled out floors, going up to a tiny "S" hallway between two elevators, to another floor in a totally different orientation and so forth.

 

I rationalize it as taking a circuitous route to the hostiles to gain a tactical advantage while reducing civilian interaction as much as possible.  That's my standard approach in other games (SS2, Deus Ex series, Half-Life series, Fallout 3/4/NV, Mass Effect series, Left 4 Dead series, et cetera).  In this one, how I'd normally do it - avoid the frontal assault in favor of taking a slightly longer way around to surprise the enemy - is compatible with the inherent design of office maps, so I'm not nonplussed by that design.

 

52 minutes ago, Greycat said:

The other, possibly a first reaction, would be "so... big, rectangular maps with some shelves or cubicles? Meh."

 

Eh.  It depends on how those shelves and cubicles are arranged.  Look at Left 4 Dead/L4D2.  You're essentially on rails, but even within the boundaries of the ridiculously constricted corridor through which The Director allows you to move, you still have two, three, sometimes four different routes you can take.  You reach a convergence point, then it branches off again into more paths to the next convergence or the safe room.  It's not what's in a space, it's how what's in a space is used.

 

1 hour ago, Greycat said:

Would you find these "more realistic" maps more or less fun?

 

I don't disagree that neither Cryptic nor Paragon were particularly... inventive or creative in map design or layout.  They stuck to their pencil and paper roots and it shows.  Later maps have some more interesting features, like those little side offices with opening doors, but they're still lacking in actual value.  They're pointless set dressing.  In, for example, Deus Ex, those little side offices would have ventilation ducts in them, which we could climb into and use to go around a checkpoint if we couldn't hack it, or avoid combat to reach the MacGuffin.  Or they'd have special interactables which we could use to progress in some way.  They'd be relevant, in some way, and their existence would be justified by something.  I think that's the biggest problem with our maps, they're either little more than spaces which exist for no purpose other than to have somewhere for the action to occur, or they're packed with set dressing which is neither interesting nor useful in aiding progress.

 

So I wouldn't complain if maps were more like the maps in my other favorite games.

[Techwright]

I've considered this often, in fact, I go into big buildings looking around to decide whether that building's design is feasible as an entertaining CoH arena.  I think my answer would be "it depends".

 

The hospital where I work would make a superb game environment.  This is because it has everything:  wide open rooms like the cafeterias and the Emergency Room, hallways with most double-wide to accommodate 2-way mobile bed traffic, outdoor areas like the covered freight dock, maintenance accessible roofs at differing heights, hospital gardens, and parking garage, destroy-able/savable target areas like the power generation annex and the tech networking areas,  many, many elevators and some in weird areas ( I can even think of one that goes...yes...1 floor up), etc.  I could probably think of more if I put my mind to it. 

 

The other thing that make the hospital ideal is that it was constructed in stages over 100 years (this month actually!)  and the stages are kind of a pastiche, so there's a wide variety of rooms and corridors.  It's not just a box with a blah layout.   I think that a possible key point in selecting interesting buildings.  Those that have been modified over a long time will likely have a lot of variables.

 

Even our headquarters would make an interesting CoH fighting area.  It's a salvaged and converted 120-year old textile factory, with wide-open work areas and spacious central hallways that serve as party/event areas, and it's only a couple of stories tall, with elevators and stairways in several spots.  The layout of rooms and hallways is definitely not standardized, and height is generous given that the chambers were built back when air conditioning in the Deep South was not available, and the higher the ceiling the cooler the floor area.

 

Buildings with cookie-cutter layouts might not need to be entirely boring either.  Consider, for example if a high-rise still stood in Boomtown, but the damage to it changed the cookie-cutter layout.  Elevators would be offline, stairs would be the necessary means, and fallen, unstable debris would have blocked access between certain floors forcing you to exit and work your way across the floor to another set of stairs.  The vanilla floor would be awash with destruction (add-able/modifiable partially-fallen ceilings, broken up floors, strewn furniture, etc.) creating a unique obstacle course to fight through each floor.

 

I guess the answer is to assume that the buildings we enter are not the cookie-cutter blocks kind, or that we only enter a few of those.

 

One thing I would push for, however, is matching interiors to exteriors.  Not necessarily perfectly, mind you, but I don't want to go into a door of a 1-story warehouse and have a 6-story interior.  So somehow coding doors to only use something reasonably compatible would be a concept I could get behind.  Especially when we still might open a warehouse door and get a cave.  Ugh.

 

 

 

Edited September 6, 2021 by Techwright

[Gatling]

Great question! My answer is Yes and No.

For all intents and purposes, a big part of the replayability of COH are the maps that randomly generate. You can't always predict how things will work and go. This means going through missions is more or less unpredictable.

 

That being said, there are ways to create realistic, randomly generated modular maps. And while it would INITIALLY be a lot of work, it would work out into a really customisable and similar experience.

First you'd need to generate a floor plan, and a way to lock those floorplans into routes. Then while the building is in itself realistic, the general method that plays out would be similar to the Current CoH experience. This also offers opportunities, because then the player could also KNOW that there are Rooms or halls or doors beyond certain locations, allowing the missions to design bonuses for accessing or deviating from the Locked routes. Also those officers/modules would be able to be changed/randomised into different themes to suit the missions. ANOTHER benefit of more realistic floor plans can accommodate more realistic mission maps and structure like Entering into a building from outside onto the floor you need (Like the AE building).

Flight? Indoors? How about flying directly to the top floor. etc.

Edited September 6, 2021 by Gatling

[DoctorDitko]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

so I'm not nonplussed by that design.

Does that make you plussed, or do you just break even? Anyway, I agree, I hate it when designers plus you without asking.

 

I would love some more maps. But let's not worry about replacing the ones we have, let's just add some new ones that are more logical -- and some that are deliberately maze-like!

 

I suspect that would be a lot less work.

[MHertz]

No, it wouldn't make them more fun. Here's why, in my opinion.

 

1. Current map design synergizes with mob design. The maps are strung out and gangly because they kinda have to be. Enemies have a perception radius; powers have areas of effect. If you condensed the maps down into a realistically square space, the mob spawn sites would have to be closer together. This means it'd be much harder to attack one group without summoning nearby groups. To balance that out, the levels would have to be much bigger, to allow spawn points to be farther apart, which would in turn make the maps seem emptier. Add to that larger space a bunch of geometry to get hung up on, and it wouldn't be very fluid.

 

2. Map design accommodates tier 1 and tier 2 travel powers like Hover and Combat Jumping, as well as 8-foot-tall players and even taller enemies. A realistic building wouldn't have 15 foot ceilings and extra-wide hallways and large rooms with balconies you can fly up to and stairwells you can jump up. Battles would happen in more compact spaces. Targeting would be harder. Camera positioning would be a battle in itself. Getting through doors would be annoying. You'd end up having a Tanker taking point in a narrow hallway, and half the party can't even see around the corner to target the bad guys properly.

 

Would it be nice to see more varied maps? Sure. Hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, etc. But small and cramped and human-sized, no thanks.

Edited September 6, 2021 by MHertz

[Shred Monkey]

What we have today is a traditional dungeon crawl.  It's a tried and true gaming concept that works.   

 

I don't think you could pull them out and replace them with a more traditional building map. 

 

However, the mayhem missions give a good model on how to do this properly.   Start the mission outside and down the street, then fight your way to the door and then storm the building.  Apex and Tin Mage pull this off very well also.

[A Cat]

I'd say yes, but with the caveat that the ceiling height and hallway width remain larger than real life, since we are generally in 3rd person unlike in real life. Some of these offices are crazy. 

[Snarky]

Yes.  Although a lot more work. Not even talking about from Dev standpoint.  Learning to navigate the doors corridors choke points and spawn / glowie location of freestanding multi level structures would be a ton of new situational options to cope with. But yes, more realistic structures would be nice

[Coyotedancer]

The Crazy Office Designer can stay underground, helping to rebuild collapsed sections of Oranbega. Those are at their best when they're an absolute maze made of of weirdness and giant stone heads.