Concerns With Map Reworks
I think that MacMillan and Badham were fairly well done. Personally I preferred the old look, but my main focus is the map design and balance, not so much how it looks. My concerns come with the recent autohaven/ormond reworks. I think that these changes are a continuation of a trend which has been occuring for a while, one of map balance. This is something I'm all for, as I think that many maps are in need of changes. That being said, the way they are doing this is problematic to me. On many autohavens (which I felt was faily balanced already except Blood Lodge), the solution to this problem seems to be deadzones. The formula for generating maps seems to generate tiles as normal, but rather than increasing the distance between them, other parts of the map just get left empty. Gens can still spawn here, meaning that its not just as if these areas don't come into play. This means that if a survivor gets caught working on a gen here, they're stuck in the middle of nowhere. The survivor won't have fun just getting hit with no counter, and to be honest the killer won't either, it didn't really take any skill or thought. These areas also negatively affect the killer, because a larger map is more difficult to pressure, regardless of deadzones. The other issue comes on ormond, balancing the strength of loops. It's bad to have only a few loops in an area, but its almost just as bad when there's a bunch of really unsafe pallets, which once again don't take much thought for the killer to get a hit at.
I think my main point boils down to this: I think it's important to find a good balance for maps, but a combination of strong areas and deadzones is not the solution, and neither is tons of unsafe pallets.
Not sure what could be done, but as it is going I just feel as though chase interactions may become progressively less fun for both sides.
One last note, there needs to be thought with regards to functionallity vs. good looking. Huntress hatchets can't be thrown over/through tons of new tiles, and billy can't curve around many of the new obscure junk tiles, cool as they may look. Something looking good cannot take priority over it working well.
I'm wondering what are people's thoughts on this?
Comments
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In there most recent QnA, the devs said they were going to try and apply the same equation that's in Badham to the rest of the maps. That should solve the issues of Deadzones, or at least I hope.
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My thoughts on the reworked maps is they're trying to make loops less prevalent, however if they take out a key component of the game and replace it with nothing then the issue rises that a killer can simply steamroll a team with no repercussions.
High level survivors have it so engrained in their playstyle to take an offensive approach but when that stops working it'll be hard to adapt, low level survivors won't be able to win chases as much because they don't understand the mechanics and most of the pallets allow the killer to walk around them.
They tried to alleviate this by adding breakable walls, but their careless approach to their placements either made it detrimental to the killer or survivor experience, or it's so meaningless if they replaced the doorway with an actual wall no one would notice or care.
It's an all around issue, if there were more pallets in more safe locations that would fix something, however they're not going to do that because they want to push the breakable wall mechanic, a mechanic exclusive to killers that doesn't change much overall.
Survivor gameplay is going to get more stale and aggravating, as killers easily knock them down without them coming across a single pallet, and killer gameplay is going to become boring as it's just mindlessly finding survivors, chasing them, hooking them, leaving to repeat pattern on another survivor.
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I really hate beakable walls. They completely killed my enjoyment of MacMillan.
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I agree. I think that they can be a negative for both sides. Firstly because the killer has to waste time breaking it, which especially in chase is a huge setback, and also because many loops are virtually useless after the wall is broken, leaving the survivor with fewer options. I forgot to mention breakable walls initially, but I think that majority of them are problematic.
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Breakable walls should make the killer have to think if they want to break them or not. Like "if I break this then the survivors have new path to use, but so will I". The one wall on Midwitch that opens up a new staircase is a prime example of this.
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