Modern Warfare' map design and intel misery.

Introduction

How it feels to cross a street in Modern Warfare plays. https://youtu.be/lqq9weMUG9E

"Hi!"

At the fall of the previous year, many people were excited about non-three-lane maps in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, because of how plane and restrictive map design has become in recent instalments in comparison to pre-jetpack era games. Almost a year later we all know how it turned out to be not to say that there weren't people who liked MW19. None the less what was happening and still happening in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is quite unusual for a CoD game. Well, unless you aren't old enough to be blinded by nostalgia.

"Modern Warfare 2 clip where you are getting killed from nowhere plays."

Despite me mentioning only map-design Modern Warfare's issue is much more complex than community debate over three-lane map format. In fact, map-design is only one of the subproblems besides UX design and respawn system and probably not even the most important of them all. Overall the problem with MW19 can be described as a "lack of Intel".

UX design

"UX design"

If you don't know UX stands for User Experience. The simplest way to describe UX design would be to call it the design of interactions. Interactions include pretty much every aspect of the video game because all of them affects interactions of player and the game itself in some way. So, what exactly wrong with the way Modern Warfare interacts with its players?

Compass

After playing MW I believe that humans can not regularly alter their attention between more than two points. In this game's case, these two points would be a minimap and surroundings while other indicators like an ammo counter can be looked at only occasionally because you don't need information they provide all the time. For the same reason, rally racing teams consist of two people since a driver can only focus on surroundings and car interface and thus he needs co-pilot who will read the map.

"Rally racing footage plays"

Now you may have already guessed what's wrong with the compass. Here I could have just said that it is simply unusable and conclude however I still have a lot more to tell you. If you remove minimap from the screen compass won't suddenly attract your attention and become useful. Contrary to that you would want minimap back just like a huge part of the player base wanted its return after playing the beta. And I'm saying it from my experience of trying to play MW only with the compass on the screen.

"Footage with mini-map duct-taped starts playing."

So, what exactly is wrong? The main downside of the compass is that it doesn't show you locations of your teammates which in fact, more important than the location of your enemies because that's how you know what angles are being watched and what areas of the map are under the control of your team. Blue dots are always on the screen and allow you to prevent flanking, rotate more efficiently and predict spawn flips, unlike red dots which appear only when an enemy fire his weapon. The blue marks above your teammates don't cut it since they are incapable of telling you teammates exact location and their current vision direction both of which are extremely important when making decisions on how to traverse the map at an exact moment in time.

I've already mentioned that the blue dots are more important than the red once. And since compass show you some kind of red dots lets talk about it for a minute. For a time a tried playing without minimap I just couldn't force myself to use the red dots which the compass fed to me. I'd even dare to say that you are better off with just gunshot sounds because the compass tells you only direction and sounds tell you both direction and distance. Other than that why not make minimap show red dots at its border like it has been suggested many times?

"Reddit post screenshot"

Devs already are not against giving you information about the direction to an enemy but for some reason digesting this information is made to be a pain in the ass by the devs themself.

To conclude what is a point of compass existence in this game aside from helping people with hearing disabilities which I believe is very important and average Joes who play the game in front of a TV screen without headphones? It doesn't provide anything that other systems aren't providing already. The main question how the devs see compass being used by the players and does its presence in the game indicate the disconnect between designers at Infinity Ward and actual players? This whole question is the reason why I have been talking about a single useless HUD element for so long.

It's not really a secret that for the last several years Call of Duty have borrowed ideas from other games.

"CoD games and games where they took inspiration"

And once we take a look at what games CoD took inspiration it will help us to understand designer decisions. This year inspiration were PC tactical FPS games. A lot of things were taken from there (long pauses) like doors, realistic gun animations, mounting, gunsmith and even tac-sprint.

"Footage of each feature plays"

I am personally not satisfied with the size of an area minimap shows.

"CSGO minimap close-up briefly shows"

I want to see what my teammates are doing on the other lanes and not just around me yet all I can do is to change its shape from circle to square getting a little bit more coverage. However, there is a half-assed solution of going to the menu and looking at the global map. The downside is being unable to move while doing so. In a game like Call of Duty, it is a death sentence even if we are talking about Modern Warfare. With tac sprint, simple bunny hop, slide-cancelling and despite nerfed jumpshots and ADS strafe speeds character in MW is perhaps the most agile out of all boots-on-the-ground instalments. Which again leads us to the conclusion that information about teammate locations is present in the game yet it is made to be a pain in the ass to access by the developers.

"Tac-FPS footage starts playing"

What's funny is that even in less arcady games which CoD tries to be like this year the global map is available at short notice. In SQUAD and Insurgency: Sandstorm map can be opened in full screen while not hindering players mobility.

"Visibility.mp4 starts playing"

Visibility in both CoD and tac-FPSes is another fun comparison. You all had these moments when you turn around a corner and get shot without even being able to acquire a target. To say the least, finding an enemy on the screen on Modern Warfare's complicated maps is a difficult task even without visibility issues because target acquisition is slowed down by the number of angles you are exposed to all the time. After all, your brain will scan two angles a lot faster than a dozen.

"Examples of zero fog being in tacFPS games."

This fact was recognized by tac-FPS devs and pretty much none of their games suffers from visibility problem as much as MW19 does. Escape from Tarkov and ARMA might look foggy in specific weather. Insurgency: Sandstorm used to have a sandy fog in E3 build which was scrapped already in the beta version. With complicated maps, target acquisition would be slow as is so devs of these games decided not to slow it down even further.

In Modern Warfare you can run around at Mach 2 so you don't want to waste time trying to recognize what pixels on the screen belong to an enemy yet visibility has been a problem since game's release. Contrary to that, tac-FPS games are a lot slower in nature but do not suffer from bad visibility nearly as much.

The concluding question would be is bad visibility intentional? If no then it is likely a lack of communication between art and map design departments. If yes then it is a very sloppy way to slow down the pace of the game. This way you will introduce balance problems because people being in different places don't see each other equally clear all the time.

Respawn system

Classical Call of Duty games from CoD4 to Black Ops 2 use a respawn system different from Modern Warfare 2019. In classic instalments spawn points change location only when one of the teams pushes to a certain point. By changing location I mean flipping to the other side of a map or turning clock or counterclockwise. Also, in classic games, players are mostly evenly spread around one border of a map. Like any mechanic, this can be used by skilled players to their advantage. Classic spawns are predictable because of their simplicity. Meanwhile, predictability is perhaps one of the most important qualities of a game for skilled players because it will result in less chaos and less chaos will result in more control thus making a cause of every death your personal mistake that can not be blamed onto a game and allowing to use more game mechanics to your advantage.

Group spawns

In MW19 the complications start from the very beginning when the game prefers to spawn teammates close to each other instead evenly spreading across the lanes or spawning them at the beginning of a mid. This creates map control issues because eventually entire team if its players died too many times, might end up at the same place. For example, you push eastern side-lane and die. In a classic CoD, you would have been respawned at the back of the same lane or somewhere nearby and kept contesting this lane but in Modern Warfare you are getting grouped with a teammate who might as well be at the other end of a map. In result, you either lose control over the lane you was contesting after just one death or gain a disadvantage because you are reaching this lane a lot later. If this happens to many times the losing team would have a harder time taking back control over the map thus resulting in snowballing where the winning team can maintain a significant advantage for a long time by winning control just once.

Of course, most of the Modern Warfare maps are a lot harder to traverse alone and sometimes you have to cooperate with teammates by entering a room simultaneously or watching overlapping angles. In 6v6 format you have just two men per lane and the said mechanic seems rational none the less, I wish it was toned down a little bit. Meanwhile, in 10v10 said mechanic is completely unnecessary because 10 people are just enough.

Revenge spawns

The complications do not end here because the location of each player’s spawnpoint is also dynamic in its own way. When you die the game might make an attempt to spawn you somewhere close to your killer so you could have an easy revenge. Do you remember these moments when you die to the same guy several times in a row? It's the game just tries to help you to have vengeance. You can already guess how it affects spawns on small maps like Shipment.

Revenge spawn is not as predictable as a normal spawn because it can occur at any place on the map when the normal spawn occurs only at the map borders.

When revenge spawn occurs to your enemy you won't have time to reposition if an opponent spawns to close to you thus you will have to participate in a head-on fight with an enemy who spawned in a place you can't predict and knows where you've been two seconds ago. This system forces you either retreat after every kill which sounds completely braindead to me especially in a CoD game with such an arcady movement system. I get that this mechanic is supposed to bring down to the ground above average guys who might kill a lot of people in a single game and to lift your average Joe from the dirt. The exact job that SBMM is supposed to do if it actually exists of course.

At last, I have a theory that frequency of revenge based spawns might depend on your in-game stats like your overall and this match KD. It means that if you die a lot you are more likely to get a revenge spawn. If you kill a lot you are also likely to get revenge spawn but this time it will be for the enemies you kill. No matter how believable it sounds keep in mind that this is not proven.

Other than that the frequency of both revenge and team spawns may vary from map to map although again it’s not proven by any testing and based purely on my feelings.

In general

Once we are talking about spawns let's again take a look at tacFPS games. Almost every FPS game at the beginning of a match give you basic information. It's the very information that is used as the main material for assumptions about enemy movement and actions. In most of the FPS games, it's a player's starting point e.g. respawn location. Knowing the enemy's starting point you can predict the general direction where a threat will come from. Knowing when respawn occurred you can roughly guess how much distance enemy has travelled since his respawn and thus which positions are already accessible to him. So basically timing and direction are two main things that the knowledge about starting points give you.

But here is the thing. CoD games, in general, do not and never did give you info about timings because after the first minute into match players die and respawn at the random moments in time thus making timing predictions mostly impossible. Of course, you can make predictions limited to one lane that you just died on because you memorised where enemies are and can make and assumptions where they might already be some time after you respawn again if it won't get messed up due to revenge spawns which by the way can result in unexpected flank so your direction info is Cecoted up as well.

Basic info is taken away in CoD, but still present in tacFPS it tries to copy

Map design

Map design problems of this game are a lot more simple to explain because they can be separated into distinct types and than highlighted which is exactly what I’m gonna do in this section.

Angle imbalance (AI)

The first one on the list I call angle imbalance. This problem occurs when at an arena there is an uneven amount of positions available to both sides.

The junkyard at Shoothouse is an example of such a problem. The Blue team has only one entrance through the arc at their disposal. Whereas the Red team players reach this area faster and once they do they have several positions behind broken cars. I think an outcome of a battle is pretty obvious here. Please note that this problem sometimes might be contextual. In the said case, if Blue team somehow wins the fight over the scrapyard the situation will repeat but now for the Red team. Reds going to have only one entrance while blues will have plenty of positions behind the broken cars to defend the area.

General area imbalance (GAI)

Aside from making you able to say that some map in this game has a big GAI, General Area Imbalance problem covers the cases which Angle Imbalance do not. GAI is used when the definition of AI is not enough to describe why a certain area is imbalanced and may take into account such things as elevation, availability of safe passages, headglitches and so on. This type of problem can be contextual just like AI.

Also, GAI can be scaled up to the size of a dedicated lane. Honestly, I couldn’t find any good examples in Modern Warfare because AI is almost always enough to describe an imbalance of a certain area so I’ve made one in Unreal Engine editor. Here there is no angle imbalance because both sides have one piece of cover but the Red team has a headglitch on their side while Blues have a box that hides only your legs.

Eternal stalemate (ES)

“Battlefield 4 Operation Locker footage plays.”

The Eternal stalemate occurs when at an arena two teams are stuck at their positions and none of the two can take a hold of the other for the reasons outside of player’s skill. As an illustration here’s a map I’ve made in UE4 editor. Both teams have exactly identical buildings at their disposal. Both buildings have a lot of windows but there is also a huge distance between them. With this amount of angles to watch and a giant gap between them, there is very little chance that any of the teams will be able to cross to the other side. Thus, Blues and Reds are doomed to an eternal massacre of each other because none of them can end the battle by winning.

When it comes to Modern Warfare this problem for some reason mostly occurs near the spawn areas like here on Grazna Raid. The spawn area seems pretty good. There are some elevated positions and an overall decent amount of positions to shot from and the other team ain’t having it half bad either. The problem is that these two areas are separated by a really wide road which does not let any of the teams capture the control over this part of the map which by the way results in a spawntrap.

High spawntrap likeliness

Spawntraps do not necessarily occur as a result of Eternal Stalemate problem. In fact, any problem may cause a spawntrap. Basically, HSL is any of the problems described previously but occurring near a spawn area. I’m describing it very briefly but this problem has the potential to be very complex with problems on all of the three lances resulting in a spawntrap. Besides, please note that to occur spawntrap sometimes may require trapping team to hold their positions instead of pushing.

Example for HSI will be the place on Grazna Raid that I mentioned in the description of Eternal Stalemate.

Side imbalance

Side imbalance is a problem when a team having a spawn area on a certain side of the map means that said team has a higher chance of winning. SI is a complex problem occurring due to smaller problems being present around the entire map.

Let's go back to Shoothause. I’ve already mentioned why junkyard is problematic and how it favours the Red team by allowing it to reach the area and take positions faster so let's take a quick look at two other lanes. The mid goes to Red again because one the entrance from the junkyard is de facto already belongs to Reds since they have an advantage at capturing junkyard which is connected to the mid. The office window overlooking mid also doesn’t help since the office by default belongs to Reds. Finally, the advantage in container area also goes to red because they have several positions behind the containers and two pщsitions in the office windows while Blues have the only position in the arc and position on the red containers which leads to angle imbalance in favoгur of the Red team. As you can see Reds have an advantage on all three lanes from the beginning thus resulting in a map being Red heavy.

SI mostly affects a match just after both teams respawn. In one life modes, however, the problem will affect the disadvantaged team for the entire round. For instance, in search and destroy the advantaged team is more likely to make an open frag. Players in disadvantage will have only 6 of their lives to overcome the effects of the issue and have to do it in multiple rounds to win. It differs a lot from TDM like gamemodes where players have 5-15 min game and several dozen of lives to fight the clusterfuck map-designer has created. Not to say that the side balance isn’t important in these modes. In the case of Team Deathmatch, the objective is a mindless fragging yet the devs somehow managed to add an objective to it by forcing players to fight for advantageous respawn area. In Hardpoint, on Shoothause you have a huge advantage at holding the first hardpoint at the mid if the game decides to spawn your team on the office side.

It’s fine if certain spawnareas are better then the other but only if they belong to nobody at the start and even this is questionable because already winning team would gain even more advantage by capturing such spawn area. Otherwise, you are putting one of the teams at a disadvantage from the very beginning.

Add the bit about basic intel like a location of spawn areas. Mention tactical FPS where spawn locations are pretty much static.

Conclusion

When it comes to new spawn mechanic I think it mostly sucks even from a casual player standpoint. Spawning players close to each other forces them to be more organized to counteract this which creates complications for average and below-average players. Revenge spawns might be beneficial to the casual audience but, they often force you to retreat after making a kill and makes the game more chaotic. And obviously, map-design issues hurt everyone’s experience.

My suggestion to the devs would be to remove revenge spawns and tone down or remove entirely group spawns depending on gamemode and scale. It also would have been nice if map designers made a pass on the map pool by fixing some issues I stated above.

And yeah, that's pretty much it.