Quest to Nowhere

I have spent more time then I care to imagine playing videogames, a lot of that has been playing multiplayer shooter games like Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Perfect Dark, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and the like. As such, over that time I’ve come to some derive some theories on how multiplayer levels should be designed, based on my experiences.

Essentially it comes down to two things: flow and balance. While both are important for multiplayer level design, each if specifically more important for one type of multiplayer. Basically flow is important for deathmatch/free-for-all game types, while balance is the important factor for team based game types.

Flow, or what I mean by it in terms of level design, is the way players travel through a level, but also it’s about controlling the areas where players will battle. Having good flow in a level is helps keep the players from getting lost, but also helps direct them towards their objective. Which in deathmatch games is to kill the other players, so it’s about directing them into places where they can have battles. These areas are typically more open than other rooms, and are designed for clusters of players to battle without it feeling too chaotic.

For good examples of flow in a free-for-all style map I would look at some of the Unreal Tournament 2004 maps, as well as the Quake 3 maps. These maps generally did the best job in regards to flow, because the levels were constructed basically as mazes that wrapped back in on themselves. This made it so that players, even if they got lost, would eventually find themselves moving from the smaller hallways of the level into the more open areas where much of the fighting took place. Additional those hallways served as places for players to escape to to restock weapons and health, but the more powerful weapons and power ups are placed in the open areas to draw players into those spaces.

Balance is a little easier to explain, level balance for a team based game is so that the level is constructed in such a way as to not give either team an advantage. Most of the time, in order to balance the game for the teams, the level itself has to be designed to favor one team over the other in order for the game to work as intended. For instance in a capture the flag type game where there is only one flag, one team might be designated to protect it and lose if the other team manages to capture it. In this case the map would need to be balanced to give the defending team an advantage in order to make it challenging for the other team to win, but not too advantageous that it is too difficult for the attacker.

The best examples of balance come from the maps in Team Fortress 2, specifically Dustbowl for asymmetric balance and Badlands for symmetric balance. With symmetric maps the balance is a bit easier then the asymmetric stuff, since the map is the same on both sides. So whatever one team has the other team has, whether that is a weakness or a strength in how the map is designed.

However there is a bit more to it then just giving each side the same level layout. The way Badlands (control point gametype,) is designed is so that most of the battling occurs around the central map point (as you can see in the heat map of the level below, which shows the places where players die frequently.) It does this by making the second control point (which is the next point a team has to capture after the center point,) very difficult to defend as an attacker. So once it is taken by the attacker they need to move quickly to the last point before they lose it.

TF2 heat map of CP_Badlands

It is also not easy for the defending team to protect it either, at least not directly. Because the point is on a spire of sorts, it is higher up then any other part of the map that the player can get to. So even protecting it you can only shoot up at it. There also is not much room around the point itself, which makes it hard to set up a defense on the point, especially with sentry guns. Which makes it so that the defender is pushed to defend by stopping the attacker before they reach the point, and it laid out the map in such a way as to give them the ability to do so by making the area around this point very open. But they also provided the attackers with a more round about route to the second point which could allow the attackers to thwart the defense by flanking it.

Additionally the final point itself is even more advantageous to defend. Although there are a number of avenues for the attacking team to enter the room from, all of them are easily defendable with a few sentry guns. Now the need to give the defender such an advantage at this control point, and the previous one, is that the defender needs to be able to more then just defend they also need to attack. So by giving them an advantage in defending the expectation is that this will allow a few of the players to go on the offensive to try and take the attacker’s point so that they can maybe shift the momentum of the match.

Now with asymmetric maps like TF2′s Dustbowl (control point gametype,) one team is always on defense and the other is always on offense. Generally though asymmetric is a lot like a symmetric map once someone has taken the middle point, although there are some differences that need to be accounted for.

For instance the defending team doesn’t need to go on the attack at all, so having something like Badlands’ second point would be a poor choice for an asymmetric map since it was designed to have a lot of back and forth fighting over. Which is not something you have at all in an attack/defend map since once a point is taken in this mode it can’t be taken back. For that point to work in this type of game mode then it would need to be changed to allow the defender to actually defend the point directly, rather then be forced to defend in indirectly as I mentioned earlier.

TF2 heat map of CP_Dustbowl

So while there needs to be an advantage for the defender here, there also needs to be an advantage for the attacker. The attacker advantage is to give them a number of ways to get at the control point, but also to give them a place where they can set up to assault the next point. This area for a fire base is needed since the respawn area for Dustbowl doesn’t move during the round for the attacker. It also allows the defending team to have a more active defense that goes out to deal with these bases, rather then simply sitting and waiting for the attackers to make their move. This however is more about player psychology then level design.

Now while I’m specifically highlighting balance and flow as two major aspects that should be the concern of a level designer for a multiplayer FPS game, they are obviously not the only ones. Especially in regards to the type of game mode the map is intended for, or what unique gameplay qualities one game has over another. While those levels I mentioned before work in TF2, they probably wouldn’t if they were ported to a game like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, or Battlefield: Bad Company 2, because of the gameplay mechanics involved in those games.

And as I said across different game types even within the same game require different considerations. For instance in TF2 there is a map called Well which started as a control point map, not unlike Badlands, but then they created a capture the flag version of this map. The CTF version has been altered a good deal, taking a rather large chunk of the map away, and replacing it with some new terrain, because that area in the CP game was the central point and was a good place to setup a firebase or for one team to defend from. Which in a CTF game would quickly cause a map to fall out of balance since it would make it difficult not only to get through to get to the flag, but also for the player to travel back through to bring the flag to their base. While also making it easier for the other team to take the flag since most of the map would essentially be in their control.

So to wrap this up; flow is the most important aspect of level design for free-for-all deathmatch style games, since its about drawing the players into specific areas of the level where they can have interesting battles. Yet also provide them with ways to escape or regroup if they need to get away from a player or players. While balance is the most important aspect of team based games, because you want to make things as even between the teams as possible, such that the only factor in deciding which team wins a match is based on their skill, tactics and strategy.