Maps need a shakeup - and I'm not talking about balance

LittleBigSunset

This is something that's been rattling around in the back of my mind for a while, and I think the moment I finally snapped and decided to make this post that, frankly, about four people are going to read was when I was playing on Greenville Square and realised that half the map is literally just rocks and boulders with pallets around them. Did Mikaela and Sable live in a mining town? Does the Entity have a rock obsession? Where is the rest of the 'Square' (and no, I'm not counting the one little statue right at the back of the boulder-laden field)?

Then I started to apply this thinking to other maps. The Macmillan Estate, which is meant to be an actual mining town, has random walls littered about (what we call 'jungle gyms') like the Entity accidentally made a bulk order for 500 wooden walls and just tossed them down wherever it could find the space. They don't fit with the aesthetic that the map is trying to create at all. Why not transform them into a sort of mining office space, or a mining platform/well? Why aren't we allowed to actually descend into any of the mines? Autohaven does this much better at least with using stacks of cars in place of some of the walls, but this 'effect' of random walls, rocks and whatever else still bleeds through.

The ground is far too flat too. There's no 'gradient' to the maps, if that makes sense. Mount Ormond Resort, which is meant to be a ski resort on top of a literal mountain has nothing but flat ground that's scattered with more boulders and more random walls (yay). There's a couple of small hills, but that's the limit. I realise I've just contradicted myself there, but I can't be bothered to change the wording. The Swamp, as much as I detest it, is ironically one of the best maps for this sort of thing because it actually has natural rises and dips, like the centre of the map is infact a drained swamp.

What I'm trying to get it at is that I feel like the maps we have lack vital character in places and as a result more often than not blend into each other. You're welcome to act as the Entity's lawyer and tell me that 'oh but Sunset, the Entity doesn't know what the real world is like, that's why it ordered all those boulders for the cheap from that mining company that was going out of business and put them down every three yards' but I don't think that excuse should hold up anymore. The Entity's been in this line of work for eight years - it should know what it's doing by now.

I'd just like maps that feel a little more like actual places and less like one actual interesting location surrounded by boulder and wall city. We've got some maps that I feel do good enough to stand out (like Garden of Joy) but others are sorely lacking. I want little forest streams in Shelter Woods, cattle pens with livestock out in the fields on Coldwind, ambulances on Crotus, a cultist camp in the Garden of Joy… I could go on. Something more aesthetically pleasing than wall tile or boulder tile 435 so that I have something nice to look at when I'm inevitably bled out by the killer again for looking at them the wrong way.