Worst room in game?

[BjorJlen]

6 hours ago, Snarky said:

My personal favorite is the Arachnos Reactor room with ramps and elevators that is about 17 stories tall. 

 

   If that is the one I am thinking of... the room with the giant robot is in, then no. That is one of my favorite rooms in the game, if only for the real giant robot. 🙂 Other than that, I (as others have mentioned) cannot stand the blue tunnel maps, especially the cake room (which I can easily get around in actually). And especially when I have to escort a civilian mission. They tend to at least once, get hung up in the tunnels, even though the "pathing" is much better these days. Ahhh well, such is gaming life... Ya gotta take the good, with the bad, with the ugly. Tis the only way to live... 🙂

 

"Mr Snarky, the snaggle toothed Vampire, needs money (or a life). So if you send all the donations to me, I will make sure he gets them post haste. Thank you'z. 😄" - T 

[Skyhawke]

18 minutes ago, Techwright said:

Just like the black Arachnos bases, I have to ask: did the designers ever consider what it takes for the inhabitants to traverse these areas on a daily basis?

 

Hey Phil.

-Hey Bob.

Shift change?

-Yeah...sigh.

Well, good luck.

-Thanks. <jumps down 2 story drop>

[srmalloy]

4 hours ago, Oubliette_Red said:

If I recall correctly (and I may not because 15 years or so have passed) but I believe the maps comprise of cubes of map pieces that are fitted together to make the completed map. During one of the last Meet'n'Greets I believe one of the Legacy Devs mention that they were trying to figure out how to make those pieces come together on generation to make for truly random maps (I think for AE anyway) but because of glowie/mob spawn locations it was proving to not be so simple.

I had a similar conversation with Positron at one of the Meet'n'Greets at the San Diego Comic-Con, where I mentioned Re-Volt, a 3rd-person RC toy car racing game that had a 'user track generation' mode where you could place predefined track blocks to create a race track, and wondered if it would be possible to do the same sort of thing with the map blocks in CoH for designing custom maps for AE. He said that the map creation interface wasn't robust enough for that, and that it would take a really large amount of work to make an editor bulletproof enough to give to the users for making maps. Aligning adjacent blocks was a big issue -- on the yellow office maps released with CoV, you would (and, rarely, still do) run into cases where a corridor ends in a black wall, which you can pass through and find yourself in the continuation of the corridor, and turn around to look back and see the corridor you came from; this is caused by a tiny misalignment of the map blocks causing the rendering engine to not see the blocks as joined, so it draws a black wall instead of rendering the next block. 

 

However, doing a uniform scaling (and translation) of the pieces making up the existing tunnel maps should keep the relative positions of all the joints the same, so it shouldn't break something. It would still be a significant amount of work, but less than throwing them out and reconstructing everything.

[srmalloy]

2 hours ago, BjorJlen said:

If that is the one I am thinking of... the room with the giant robot is in, then no. 

You're thinking of the room at the end of the Moonfire TF, which was rethemed by stripping out the mech and gantry to use for the Trapdoor mission in Mender Ramiel's arc. The Arachnos reactor room is an enormous hollow space where you enter about halfway up one wall on a walkway along the wall; it has some (railing-free, so falling risk) ramps going to higher levels, and (IIRC) elevator shafts that take you do the bottom, where there are a number of reactor pods in a pool of some disgusting liquid, and it's big enough to hit the render distance limit from top to bottom, and exceeds the limit of range-boosted attacks from one side to the other. It's huge, mostly empty, and if you're unlucky enough to get it in a 'defeat all' map, you'll spend more time running around trying to find everything there than you would in the Arachnos training facility room cluster.

[RCU7115]

11 hours ago, Snarky said:

My personal favorite is the Arachnos Reactor room with ramps and elevators that is about 17 stories tall. 
 

There is the layer cake room. The Council pool room. The cave that snakes back around on too of itself in a corkscrew.  
 

Any others?  
 

Post what you think are the worst!

That's definitely my most hated room in the game and needs to be removed immediately as I posted a few weeks ago.

[bAss_ackwards]

9 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

 

For me it's the one that @Snarky is in!

Now now... there's no need to be snarky with your answer.

[kanga]

Not really a room, but a very small outside map, lots of rubble, during the Black Scorpion patron Arc. There is one spot, where you look in one direction, I can get an RTX4090 down to sub 20fps. There is something in that area that is just not working right. lol. 

[Uun]

Square lab map room with a raised central platform, surrounded by a further raised walkway with 4 ramps leading down to the central platform (often referred to as the "room of death"). It's virtually impossible to attack anything on the central platform without aggroing the mobs on the raised walkway. [Safest method is to start with the uppermost walkway and work your way down after clearing that first.]

[Scarlet Shocker]

9 hours ago, bAss_ackwards said:

Now now... there's no need to be snarky with your answer.

 

I'm not @Snarky in any way, shape, size or form. 😎

 

I have never been @Snarky

[BjorJlen]

13 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

 

I'm not @Snarky in any way, shape, size or form. 😎

 

I have never been @Snarky

 

Scarlet Snarky Shocker...?

   Snarky Scarlet Shocker...?

   Scarlet Shocker Snarky...?

 

   Which one of these is not like the other's? 😁

 

"Have you ever danced with the devil (or Snarky) in the pale moonlight?" - T

[Captain Fabulous]

The layer cake room for sure.

[lemming]

Those first two are horrible, but pretty much any map layout with hidden areas on kill alls.

[ChzBoi]

16 hours ago, srmalloy said:

.... run into cases where a corridor ends in a black wall, which you can pass through and find yourself in the continuation of the corridor, and turn around to look back and see the corridor you came from;......

....so this kinda stuff?.....

[RCU7115]

2 hours ago, Uun said:

Square lab map room with a raised central platform, surrounded by a further raised walkway with 4 ramps leading down to the central platform (often referred to as the "room of death"). It's virtually impossible to attack anything on the central platform without aggroing the mobs on the raised walkway. [Safest method is to start with the uppermost walkway and work your way down after clearing that first.]

That room can be done solo , but with an 8 player teams it's just about impossible because there's always 1 or 2 players on a team never looking at chat when directions come from the leader.

[tidge]

My least favorite outdoor map is OUTDOOR_RUINED_02A.  The objective still find places to hide on it from me. Oddly I rarely have trouble finding all the hidey holes on Oranbega maps.

 

I dislike the tech "Lab" rooms, because the critters will find ways to hide.

 

My absolute least favorite Council caves are blue side, in Tobias Hansen's arcs... the critters move around and hide themselves, making it very difficult for me to 'defeat all' to find the last objective.

[gameboy1234]

On 7/4/2025 at 10:34 AM, Kaika said:

The old blue/brown caves in their entirety, with the aforementioned layer cake room.

 

I honestly love them from a atmospheric standpoint but they are just BAD. Narrow winding corridors filled with random bits of geometry to get stuck on. Many rooms have multiple floors with tons of nooks and cranny to hide out in. The tight corridors make travel powers and movement, my favorite aspects of the game, feel anywhere from frustrating to useless.

 

They were very much made by a inexperienced dev team that still had little to no idea how their game actually played, 

 

On 7/4/2025 at 10:57 AM, El D said:

 

That's a very interesting point. The original mission map designs feel a lot more like FPS maps of that era than MMO maps, much less anything like the map designs CoH got later or that MMOs institute now. Travel powers being accessed much earlier - and the overall cranking up of gameplay speed - definitely adjusted how open and free-roaming mission maps became. Though, remembering the original map progression, by the time players had travel powers a lot of those big 'area of city zone/destroyed zone/forest' maps were more available around then too, so there was some semblance of player-related progression there. A lot of the endgame maps back then were also the giant open-air ones.

 

Also I'll echo some earlier posters - the massive Oranbega maps with all the little side rooms and buildings to explore is a fantastic set piece, but a major pain on any character taller than the default height. My main for a long time was an 8'+ tall demon man and he'd end up getting caught on every one of those green crystal chandeliers. I imagine its even worse if your character is a Huge player model. I have friends whose mains use the Huge model with near max height and body sliders and I don't see how they've managed all these years.

 

 

It's kind of "everything" for me, but yes, the Oranbega maps are a good example.  I often play very tall, winged flyers, and the maps are super hard to navigate.  The OG team obviously tested their maps with a default height "male" toon and called it good.*  And I think this is the crux here, is that the team seemed to do no grey boxing, no early testing, and once the map was done, there were no resources for additional changes, so problems found later were never fixed.  (Remember when Oranbega teleporters randomly placed each character on a different point on the map?  Who the heck play tested that feature?)

 

The sad thing is they never seemed to learn.  Oranbega didn't result in any learning, and neither did any other content.  Not really anyway, you can see some improvement, but it came very slowly and was never enough.

 

(*) Have you seen the "collision box" available in the base builder?  It's supposed to represent a player's collision box.  It's a capsule--a cylinder with hemisphere ends.  I wonder if the OG dev team was testing with one of those rather than an actual player model, it would kinda explain a lot.

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

The worst room in the game is the one you couldn't get into while the game was shut down.

 

There are precisely zero worst rooms in this game in its current iteration.

[Psyonico]

On 7/4/2025 at 9:21 AM, DoctorDitko said:

my least favorite mission is the one where you get dropped into a giant industrial open-air complex, and have to find bombs and rescue civilians.

Are you referring to the mission in Levantara’s arc? I always auto complete that one.

[Heliphyn34u]

Layer cake room, of course -- really, all CoT caves, including the Oranbega ones with the raised yet interrupted poop walkways, always with one hostage tucked into a cranny underneath.  I'm not actually a big fan of the Underground in Praetoria, but that's more due to the dang ghouls dropping onto my head than the design (gonna get me a ghoul-proof hat someday, I swear).

 

Also this:

 

On 7/4/2025 at 12:21 PM, DoctorDitko said:

It's not a room, but my least favorite mission is the one where you get dropped into a giant industrial open-air complex, and have to find bombs and rescue civilians. And there are more nooks and crannies than an English muffin, and none of the glowies make any sound!

 

 

 

 

That mish is a giant pain in part because searching all those nooks and crannies is so boring -- "I've been over this building three times, but there's a civilian cowering in a far corner under a bunch of pipes that I can't target unless I drop down into the roof crevice and stroll the length of the building?  Cool, super-fun."

 

[Heliphyn34u]

7 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

The worst room in the game is the one you couldn't get into while the game was shut down.

 

There are precisely zero worst rooms in this game in its current iteration.

 

I mean, fair.

 

[gameboy1234]

18 hours ago, srmalloy said:

It would still be a significant amount of work, but less than throwing them out and reconstructing everything.

 

If it's a modest amount of work, then yes this could be a decent quick solution.  I think there are some issues though.  A lot of maps are VERY large, and this will make traversing them even more tedious.  It's going to be a trade off, some maps will be better, some might end up worse.  The extra work required to fix the largest maps might remove any benefits of a "quick" solution.

 

It might not be that hard to make new maps.  Considering the player base seems to be asking for simplified geometry, this might be feasible.  Spending resources on a proper fix instead of a "quick fix" might be the way to go.

 

(The disadvantage of better maps I think might be that a fair amount of "gameplay" is spent fighting the map, and if that goes away, then the maps might be very boring.  So again a potential tradeoff.)

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

I do not believe any of the existing maps should be changed or altered in any way. Legacy maps and missions are good learning experiences for those who wish to and it's not just about learning how to play it's learning the history of the game's development over more than two decades.

 

To change or alter some of the maps is to cheapen its legacy. It's not too different to making Independence Port smaller to get across it more easily.

 

The game is the game. Add to it, sure, but retrofitting it for modern tastes is a big No-No in my book. That's not just a "We had to do it so you should too" but it is "this is the experience that made the game great and why enough people fell in love with it to keep it alive against the odds.

 

Nobody really hates the blue cake cave. They love it really - because it's a great memory. We remember the annoying stuff more than the easy stuff. That's human nature.

 

Advocating for change can be extremely dangerous in unanticipated ways and this is, ultimately, just a game so let's keep those annoying things in because they are few and far between and give us amazing stories to tell which is why we fell in love with this whole thing in the first place.

[Triumphant]

53 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I do not believe any of the existing maps should be changed or altered in any way. Legacy maps and missions are good learning experiences for those who wish to and it's not just about learning how to play it's learning the history of the game's development over more than two decades.

 

To change or alter some of the maps is to cheapen its legacy. It's not too different to making Independence Port smaller to get across it more easily.

 

The game is the game. Add to it, sure, but retrofitting it for modern tastes is a big No-No in my book. That's not just a "We had to do it so you should too" but it is "this is the experience that made the game great and why enough people fell in love with it to keep it alive against the odds.

 

Nobody really hates the blue cake cave. They love it really - because it's a great memory. We remember the annoying stuff more than the easy stuff. That's human nature.

 

Advocating for change can be extremely dangerous in unanticipated ways and this is, ultimately, just a game so let's keep those annoying things in because they are few and far between and give us amazing stories to tell which is why we fell in love with this whole thing in the first place.

 

I don't agree with any of this but, to be fair, I wasn't there during the "Live" days, so maybe that has something to do with it.  Having said that, one thing I CAN say confidently as a new player (well, "relatively" new.  I started here in 2019) is that I couldn't care less about the games history, legacy (whatever that is?) or feeling nostalgia about anything that annoys me in the game (if it's annoying, I say fix it.  Again, though- that's just me).

[Scarlet Shocker]

12 minutes ago, Triumphant said:

 

I don't agree with any of this but, to be fair, I wasn't there during the "Live" days, so maybe that has something to do with it.  Having said that, one thing I CAN say confidently as a new player (well, "relatively" new.  I started here in 2019) is that I couldn't care less about the games history, legacy (whatever that is?) or feeling nostalgia about anything that annoys me in the game (if it's annoying, I say fix it.  Again, though- that's just me).

 

I think I give you top marks for callous honesty but not much else.

[Doomguide2005]

8 hours ago, Uun said:

Square lab map room with a raised central platform, surrounded by a further raised walkway with 4 ramps leading down to the central platform (often referred to as the "room of death"). It's virtually impossible to attack anything on the central platform without aggroing the mobs on the raised walkway. [Safest method is to start with the uppermost walkway and work your way down after clearing that first.]

While this room is a disaster waiting to happen my friends and I had one themed grouping where we absolutely loved the room.  All AR/Dev in our late 30's onward.  We'd line the entry hall with trip mines and caltrops probably anywhere from 30 to 60 or more depending on how many of us were online.  Then in about the only use we ever had for Time Bomb plant one while the rest of us sniped every mob we could see ... and the whole damn room would come racing into our hallway of death getting greeted by 30+ mines and multiple Full Auto.  Glorious carnage!.

Edited 23 hours ago by Doomguide2005