Dr Cheeto fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Apr 11, 2016

• Lab Rats - The whole map is basically built for a different game. Everyone knows that on higher difficulties, the position of the central zipline is make-or-break for a lot of players, but the map has larger problems. Because the meth tray and the securing position are both at the far end of the map, next to an elevated, safer zipline to the upper level, the effective shape of player interaction with the map is C-shaped. Players have little reason to go out to the starting area of the map, and ways of getting up or down are isolated enough that player separation is easy to do by accident. This is compounded by a feature that's easy to miss while you're running bags around: the map has almost no cover whatsoever that isn't a complete vertical wall. This makes downs a strong likelihood when moving around the lower level, followed by more downs when players have to jump into space or go far out of their way to get to the downed player.
  
• Golden Grin - What a waste. Golden Grin has a bunch of cool things, but it has way too much going on without enough care given to the resulting gameplay. I think the biggest problem with the map isn't actually the drill defense- it's that large portions of the map are completely useless. In Big Bank, side areas were small and tight loops that, stealth or loud, provided flanking opportunities within an enclosed space. In GGC, you go to each area once to grab a macguffin the area was built around, and then that area becomes pointless for the rest of the run. The side areas of the casino are especially bad from this perspective, since it's the only place snipers spawn. The result of all this is that you spend most of the heist in one room, and that room (with the associated defense) is all you notice about the heist.
  
• Bomb: Forest - Though not as bad as the other two here, Bomb: Forest has some real issues with enemy pathing, sightlines, and randomness that keep it from being fun for me. I don't mind the hillside, but the bugginess of the traincars, randomness of loot spawns are problems. Half the time the heist is trivial because enemies can't seem to find you- the other half they're all over you from across the map. It's also one of the few cases where sniper spawns continue to feel unfair, even after I've mostly learned their locations.
  

• Car Shop - Having tried to come up with a way to make car shop interesting for Death Vox, I confirm that it is The Worst. The layout of the building interior and exterior are just too simple for stealth design to work in an interesting way. The interior in particular feels like it was originally designed for strictly linear civilian and guard pathing like on Bomb: Dockyards, with designed safe spots, and with the keycard near, but not on, the manager. I still suspect the map was actually built from the ground up to be ECM chained; it was made right around the time that Overkill realized how effective that strategy could be. Silently sending guards to alert off of the hack remains one of the biggest dick moves in stealth design in the game since launch. The fact that half the time the guard can't see the hack to get alerted doesn't really help!
  
• Golden Grin - Subsequent patches have made Golden Grin a lot fairer in stealth than it used to be, but it's still an unfun chore of a map to complete. Big Bank remains a textbook example of how to lay out a really great stealth space, and Golden Grin ignores all of its lessons.
  *Safe spots are everywhere, but guard pathing and regional assignment is opaque, making alerts seem unfair. Blind corners abound.
  *Many parts of the front half of the map are too dark to read quickly.
  *Players are specifically prevented from splitting up for several tasks, meaning that one person plays while others do nothing.
  *Flow of difficulty is inverted-once you're in the vault, getting loot out of the map is trivial. Until that point, risk is pretty much constant. The map really needed area gating the way that Shadow Raid and Big Bank used it- a clear sense of increased risk, with a separate set of guards, mechanics, goals and aesthetics.
  *You can't pick up poker chips from the tables OVERKILL WHY
  
• Alesso - Alesso isn't as bad as the other two above, but there are a number of broken or poorly considered guard pathing scripts that can make the heist really frustrating in stealth. I don't hate the idea of a large set of separate guard pathing areas, but it does place more pressure on other parts of the design. In the case of this heist, there's too much back and forth across the length of the map, and there are too many cases where guard patrol behavior changes according to invisible triggers.
  

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Apr 11, 2016

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Apr 12, 2016