Big Maps in FPS (rant)

You know what, I still love the play Halo Custom Edition because of the humongous maps... My favorite's a big map called "coldsnap" and is so much fun to play.

http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=1770


That bridge in the center... That's about the size of Blood Gulch...


There's also a ton of vehicles and weapons not in the original game, flyable pelicans, longswords, gauss hog, and more!

I kind of feel like making a separate thread asking if people might want to go have a game of Halo

I played a lot of that but there was NEVER a point where there were remotely enough players to make the most of it. It was just "Fly / drive for 20 minutes then get shot by the f*cker in the spider cannon tank thing"

Paha, so true, I wish there was a way to break through the player limit.

This is also why I play the version where ai was added, just for the fun of shooting some covies.

the problems with big maps are ;

*hard to populate (getting enough people to play)
*not necessarily more fun. (too many people "doing their own thing" across the map)
*expensive (with modern requirements, maps require a lot of memory).
*hard to design (a lot of places need to be cool, interesting.)
*hard to balance (you'll end up with a few chokepoints anyway)
*frequently not worth it (you'll end up flying over large parts of it to get to the aforementioned chokepoints)


I played Planetside 2 (that should qualify as a "large map") but most of the action was centered around a few points. Others were doing their own buisyness elsewhere. and aside from the chokepoints, the rest of the terrain isnt interesting.


NOTE:

COD maps are just about the opposite to this, as they are IMHO TOO small and are basically made entirely of one, two or three huge chokepoints.

I played Crysis 2 and 3 multiplayer, and it so insanely suffered from this. COD maps aren't big begin with, but with the Nanosuit the action was so insane that unless you have a buff computer and sit next to the servers, a tiny bit of lag and you miss that enemy coming from across the street punching you in the face. Yes, punching you in the face.

Battlefield has traditionally fought this with bigger maps, but again the same problems just show: couple of chokepoints, not much else is interesting. Metro (in BF3) was my favorite, but it too was basically 3 huge choicepoint lanes with some intersections

I don't regret purchasing BF4 and premium. I've had a lot of fun with the game. My only disappointment with the maps are that (Pretty much all the maps suck for Rush) and that the Operation Metro remake still didn't solve the problems that the original had.

Operation Metro was TERRIBLE.
Especially all those stupid 10000 ticket no cap servers that came up for it

My biggest concern with modern shooters is that everything's dumbed down to the point where the gunplay doesn't take any mechanical skill at all. Like everyone's carrying fully automatic rifles which kill in like 3 shots and have little to no spread, you don't need to be able to track when you can just hold the fire button and sway the crosshairs over their general direction. The less it takes to kill the opponent the more room it leaves for luck and just bad play in general.

To me, looks like what most multiplayer games strive to be.