Dustbowl...

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Sep 7, 2012
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Here's one issue: the first two stages have extremely poor spawns for the blue team. They involve attacking from low ground, which puts all classes at the mercy of demomen, soldiers, and pyros. In addition, the long sightlines give red snipers a huge advantage. In the first stage, blue snipers can only pop out at 3 specific locations, but a red sniper can be anywhere, looking at any of these three locations.
 

Hyperion

L16: Grid Member
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Jun 8, 2015
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Since goldush is essentially pl_dustbowl would you say there are any improvements to its layout vs dustbowl? Particularly spawns?
Goldrush has one spawn door with height advantage. Also it has bigger spawns, usually cut into two parts
 

Muddy

Muddy
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Sep 5, 2014
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Also on the last stage, RED has two spawn rooms that they can spawn in at any one time - and one of them is closer to the first point of that stage. (2fort also does that multiple-spawns thing, and it works about as well there too)

EDIT: Actually most of Dustbowl's spawns are awful. RED's spawn in stages 1 and 2 are facing the wrong way and are weirdly far away from the second control points, and all of BLU's spawns are really easy to spam to pieces.
 

YM

LVL100 YM
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Dec 5, 2007
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There are a lot of general things to be said about dustbowl which hold true. Don't dismiss them because they're sweeping.
For example, Dustbowl is incredibly narrow in the third stage.

In every stage, blu's spawns are easy to spam into and all the exits are within easy line of sight from each other. You know when you've been totally unable to push out from your spawn? That's why. It's particularly bad on s1 and s2 where the spawn exit is lowered so it's like a bit pit of not-fun.

In both 1-2 and 2-1 the defenders are approaching from 90 degrees to where the attackers are coming from, it's worse in 1-2 than 2-1 but there have definitely been situations where there's attackers on the point and as red, I'm sandwiched between attackers on the point, and more still coming from the previous point, it's not ideal. Ideally defenders would enter the battleground from one side, and the attackers from the opposite, with the point between them. That gives a clear "our ground" vs "their ground"
 

YM

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Dec 5, 2007
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If it wasn't always, I remember Dustbowl being considered chokey in 2008
 

Muddy

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Sep 5, 2014
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Has Dustbowl (along with seemingly most of the original maps) always been particularly criticized? Or is it just in comparison to more recent maps?

Or maybe... have the players changed?
It's more that TF2 changed, I think. It was certainly a very different game to what it is now - no airblast, no building hauling, no no-damage explosive-jumping weapons, no parachuting or Market Gardening, no way for Engineers to rocket jump to hard-to-reach places and so on - and I guess TF2 mapping theory changed over time to accommodate those changes (to the point that Valve had to overhaul the clipping in a bunch of maps in 2013, since a bunch of new exploits popped up that were previously impossible to do).

And now even popular community maps like Convoy and HAARP seem really dated as a result. Makes me curious to see how maps like Thunder Mountain and Powerhouse would've played back in 2007.

Also, another thing I just remembered is that Dustbowl (as well as 2fort) are more-or-less direct remakes of maps from TFC, and I guess the gameplay of the former didn't translate to TF2 as well as Valve had hoped. (Well was also a TFC map but as I recall it changed a fair bit in TF2)