You’re in cover engaged with an enemy, and out of nowhere someone steps out of the doorway behind you and blasts you with the shotgun point blank. This is a breeding ground for what is absolutely the most frustrating scenario you can give your players. ![]() Picture a level made of many tight rooms all connected with random doors. Players are just fine with dying if they're learning from their experience, or as a result of smart play by opponents, and not just feeling like a victim. When players die, they need to feel like it was through a decision of their own making, and not the designer’s cheap trick or oversight. The player’s visibility as discussed above plays a huge role in making this happen, especially the bit about being “fair” and not random. The Holy Grail moments we look for in Gears playtest sessions come when a flank intentionally happens, it’s fairly earned, and it’s effective and rewarding to execute. There’s room for lateral movement and flanking along the front, but the general facing is always there. From either spawn position, the player immediately knows which direction the threat will be approaching from. Use walls or impassable areas to funnel players through the regions you've defined as combat areas.Ī clear example of this is the map “Escalation”, where teams start at the top and bottom of a giant linear staircase. ![]() Set up obvious defense areas and give them a facing that makes their intended use clear to anyone who sees it. The shapes and positioning of your cover can play a big part in defining a front. Since the player is essentially looking through a cardboard tube, they need to know where to look, because scanning the environment is difficult and will blow the pacing of your map. A random, sprawling arena with no clear directional structures results in enemies coming from any direction, and cover use becomes a burden instead of a benefit because it generally only works in one direction. Players need to be able to line up on some cover with your squad and concentrate fire. With this in mind, it becomes very important that both teams have a “front” or common direction an enemy is likely to come from. While technically limiting the player, this is also a major reason why Gears feels intimate, as it allows the enemy on screen to be substantially larger and more visible, and it generates tension and vulnerability. It’s like being inside the Batman suit from the original Tim Burton movie. The most important gameplay factors in Gears are the narrow field of view and restricted rotation rates. So without further ado, here they are in no particular order: The ‘fun factor’ of a Gears map can be a house of cards, so be careful when you bump it! I would caution a designer against disregarding more than one or two of these in a given map until they understand the repercussions of the various facets discussed below. ![]() Just be aware of the basics and decide consciously that you are going outside the lines rather then stumble blindly ahead. We don’t want the community to have to “reinvent the wheel”, and hopefully this doc will save both designers and players from a bunch of frustration.Įvery “rule” below can be (and has been) broken, and indeed doing so will often create something interesting or unique. ![]() We weren’t sure if we were even going to include MP in Gears simply because it is very easy to make a bad Gears map, and it took us a long time to figure out the “rules” that make MP maps worth playing. This isn’t a technical “how to use Unreal Ed” doc, but rather a high level design doc specifically for Gears multiplayer maps. We thought we’d share what we’ve found works and doesn’t work when designing multiplayer maps for Gears of War. We’re excited about the community interest in making multiplayer maps for Gears of War once the editor becomes available.
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