Striker said:
There's been zero attempts at an asymmetrical BTB map; don't include the horrifying attempts of Boneyard and Spire into this. I still don't know why they decided to split BTB's population up with inviting Invasion in the mix. It's like they didn't even care enough anymore to try to create unique asymmetric maps anymore. Like Havok said, remember when they had the vidoc for Zanzibar and sounded so excited about the attack/defense philosophy? Now it's... hey, put a spawn there, it's Slayer time yo.
GhaleonEB said:
I think it partly stems from the move away from maps crafted for specific game types and to general purpose ones. Terminal for one-flag and bomb, Relic for one-flag, Headlong for one-flag. Other map styles such as Turf for Three Plots and Waterworks for CTF.
The current BTB maps lack the focus on a handful of modes tailored to the map. I think that might be behind the lack of BTB one-sided maps, which inherently limit the flexibility of them (and so we get Invasion maps instead of true one-sided BTB ones).
Halo 2's one-sided BTB maps were God Tier.
Bingo. Focus is something that Reach's maps as a whole are lacking (or maybe it's more that they're Slayer-focused, which I think is a backwards approach to doing things). I don't have much to say on the topic that I haven't covered in the past or that hasn't been covered here. I do hope that 343 is keeping in mind that it's better to have a bunch of maps that are awesome at what they were designed for (even if it means that you have to drop Stockpile and Headhunter support on some of them, sorry) than a bunch of bad jack of all trades, master of none maps that support every gametype under the sun, 80% of which nobody wants to play. 343's got a good start with Highlands being pretty obviously designed with CTF in mind, but it's going to take a lot to get past the bad initial BTB maps on-disc.
It's obvious that the Invasion maps are tailored for that playlist, so they're awful in BTB (Breakpoint being the exception as being just mediocre. The spine works well to divide Invasion phase areas, but doesn't make sense otherwise.). Hemorrhage, while disliked by a lot of people here, works well for what Coagulation did: Neutral and Multi Bomb and Flag, but isn't really great for other objective stuff. Paradiso is painful to even think about, because Multiflag just doesn't work, the base structures are pretty awful, and it just doesn't utilize all the space that it has.
However, I really think that with some heavy tweaking, a Neutral Flag Paradiso would be kind of cool. It would at least give some purpose to the third structure. Get on it, dudes. Of course, all this is just repeating what everybody knows: that Reach's Big Team needs a ton of work and I don't think that this upcoming update will solve all those problems.
Plus, at least its within the realm of possibility to get fairly good totally forged 4v4 maps. Budget constraints pretty much kill the possibility of doing that for BTB.
