8/2 this season. Shouldn’t have played those two games and I knew it, but it happens. 2633. Still low plat I guess, not enough games to climb.
Looks like Overwatch is opening up their scripting engine for Custom Games. This is pretty cool.
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I wonder what TF2 map people will copy first
So far, I’ve seen gun game, zombies, boss modes, floor is lava, Let-Torb-Wallclimb, and Superhot.
Even a mode where Genji can summon his friendly allied Mercy by using the “I Need Healing” voiceline.
2Fort undoubtedly, literally the only map people ever seemed to play.
2Fort2000 was a triumph. Bass Ackwards was really good as well.
I’ve always wondered why in competitive shooters people latch onto one map. Tribes had a map called 2fort iirc, Counterstrike had dust, even in PUBG the original map Erangel is vastly more popular than the two newer maps. I get bored with the same map over and over and it’s one reason I’m glad to see the concept of discrete servers dying out in favor of automatic matchmaking and map rotation.
People like the idea of having complete mastery of a map, and being able to advance into the extreme endgame of pure skill in said map. Set strategies and counter-strategies, etc…
They also don’t like to lose when they’re stuck playing a new map for the first dozen times. I’ll even admit that I feel a slight disappointment when Paris is the map in Overwatch. I don’t have it really under my belt yet.
I never became sufficiently competent at TF2 to make any reasonable distinctions about maps. I just found 2 fort pretty boring design wise.
Overwatch I at least played enough to be somewhat competent, and new maps do usually take some learning.
Tribes I was pretty map agnostic. Some people that were really all about ski paths cared a lot more than I did, but I’d have played tribes with randomly generated maps and been fine with it. There were also some fun crazy variants I played.
2fort was only boring in TF2 because TF2 was itself boring and extremely tactically limited.
In Q1 MTF or Q2 WF, the 2fort maps were HUGE relative to the players themselves. Getting across midfield for an attack involved a lot of nuance, timing it with picks from your snipers, etc…
You’d have 1-2 snipers for each team battling eachother from the walls of the forts and, whenever any non-sniper was foolish enough to show up in the midfield, instantly headshotting them.
Short of your snipers winning that fight, the only other ways in were coordinated cover fire, spies taking the snipers out, or an assault through the water.
CTF matches in these maps felt very Nidhogg-esque. To attack, you had to win a battle in a series of symmetric zones, some of which had A/B options.
Midfield (above or below water), fortress, flag room approach (spiral or hall), flag room, escape flag room, escape fortress, escape midfield. The progression and order of when and how these battles occurred gave the game a distinct ebb and flow.
Due to the very limited ammo and movement options in TF2, coupled with the slow player speed and small map size, the 2fort equivalents were boring.
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I’ve never been a fan of the games with too few maps. Part of the reason I liked Tribes II so much was that the maps were enormous. I’m always looking for huge maps whether it’s in a Metroid game or BotW or an FPS. Also why I loved maps like cs_thunder. I also really hate it that RTS have so few maps and MOBAs have just one!
I feel like when there are too few maps, or maps are too small, play gets too repetitive and falls into particular patterns. You get more strategic play, with rock/paper/scissors match-ups playing out. It also makes memory and knowledge important, which I’m never a fan of.
When maps are big, there are so many possibilities that play remains varied even if there are only a few maps.
When there are a ton of maps, nobody can memorize or optimize play on any single one of them. You can’t start the game with a plan in mind. You need to explore and adapt. That is both more fun for everybody, and more skill challenging for the pros.
Give me a multiplayer FPS with large procedurally generated maps. That would be so hot.
I’m with you on that. This is why I really like Battle Royale games. The maps are huge, and even if there’s only one map initially the nature of the genre guarantees that every game is different. You can ‘spawn’ anywhere on the map because of the drop systems. The ring is random every game and at every stage within the game. Together these mean your approaches to and movement through any location are not predictable, and enemy contact can come from literally anywhere even until the very last ring. No memorization, no rock-paper-scissor match ups, only who can best take advantage of the environment and out shoot and and out maneuver the enemy. I’m actually REALLY intrigued by the idea of something like Apex Legends with procedurally generated maps every round.
EDIT: There is the possibility of being outgunned in Battle Royale too, if you only found a basic pistol or a shotgun and the enemy found assault rifles and scopes, but this presents another facet in that disengaging or not engaging is a valid and useful tactic.
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This is, funnily enough, one of the problems with Tribes Ascend, and one of two reasons a lot of people I know stopped playing. Sure, the maps were a decent, but not too huge size. But they basically had two viable routes - one biased each way - to each base for skiiing. People figured out pretty quick that you didn’t really need to chase or owt, when 90% of the time you could just camp those routes and basically never lose. The sized implied possibilities that wern’t really fulfilled, and the maps were big, but effectively were actually just an oval-shaped track, and everything off them was basically scenery.
(The other thing that made people quit was that it was real heavy pay-to-win, with paid weapons just being unambiguously better, and an absolute pain to grind for, as well as being grossly overpriced. I hear it’s better now, but honestly, I can’t be bothered with playing to find out.)
Latest update has gungame as one of the arcade modes.
It was pretty fun.
His character design is if peak 90’s Rob Liefeld took a shot at Lex Luthor in his Kryptonite warsuit.
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I’ve been getting back into Overwatch and actually started playing competitive again. To my surprise it is better now, particularly due to role queue you get better team compositions. There is als less flaming than when I stopped playing, though there is still some. Unfortunately it is also still occasionally very frustrating. I’ve been exclusively playing tank and while I am not high tier by any means (high silver-low gold), I am trying to improve and I am carrying on occasion. However, there are days like today:
- We’re playing Volskaya and run pretty fast. Opposing team gets their turn on attack and also complete the map with 1:40 left. We are still very much favored with like 3:40 in the time bank. However, one of the players on my team quits, and we get subsequently rolled.
- I then play Hanamura. We play attack first, take point A. On voice comms we all agree to go in through the high ground on the right side (as viewed by attackers). Our main tank Reinhard just runs in headlong on the bottom main entrance. I still try to do something but nobody else of our team is in reach. I barely escape but basically the attack is null. He then does that shit again. He then switches to D.VA leaving us with no main tank. When I finally die I switch to a main tank but we basically have no time left and the D.Va player has basically thrown the round. On Defense then he also does fuck-all the entire game, and holds his ultimate for an eternity and a half, not using it even when we get slaughtered on Point B.
- We’re on Route 66. We put up a very good time as I am playing D.Va, chasing Ashe’s and Hanzos off High-grounds and getting multiple triple-kills with the Bomb on defense. Nevertheless we still let the enemy team complete the map in OT, mostly because our main tank switched to wrecking ball for stalling, and then never switched back when they had completed the second checkpoint. They’re back on attack and our defense collapses. We still stop them before the first point but barely. Very manageble with our timebank. However, opponent cheeses it out with a Bastion bunker comp and our damage is completely ill equipped to deal with it and I couldn’t build a D.Va bomb without Bastion knocking me out of the mech suit.
Went like 1-5 today, losing 80 SR or so in the process.