Arathi Basin

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FOREVER

L1: Registered
Feb 14, 2011
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So in world of warcraft there is, or at least was back when I played, one pvp map that was really great - Arathi Basin. Two teams spawn in opposite corners of the map and aim to cap and hold the majority of 5 points for as long as possible. These points could be gained and lost in parallel, unlike tf2 cp, and capping a point enabled use of that point's respawn facilities (a graveyard).

Capping n > 0 points caused your team's score to increase, with parametric increases for each point your team controlled. When your team's score reached an arbitrary value, you won. if the other team reached that value before yours, you lost. A full 5-cap made your team's score increase very quickly, mercifully ending blowout games.

There are plenty of virtues to this game mode that I'd be happy to detail/debate in length (as we know). Has anyone made anything like it for tf2? That is, has anyone made a cap+hold parallel n >2 -point territory map?

EDIT: here's a satellite photo of arathi basin. Females not to scale.

ANOTHER EDIT: Obviously I'm not saying someone should directly port a sprawling WoW map to TF2. This is a question about the gameplay architecture of Arathi Basin, not the map itself.
Arathi_Basin_Map_400x267.jpg
 
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Icarus

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Sep 10, 2008
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Sounds a lot like Domination

ex dom_canalzone: http://www.vilepickle.com/creations/maps/canalzone

Canalzone's downfall, however, was its number of CPs (Eight!), which easily devolved into a messy scout rush.

The concept for this isn't far from KOTH though. I think it's worth a try.

Debate doesn't mean much. Testing and more testing is always the best way.
 
Last edited:
Apr 13, 2009
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How many players does such a match typically involve ? Do players fight like 1 on 1 or 2 on 2 or team vs team ?
 

Icarus

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Sep 10, 2008
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well, in dom_canalzone you have to keep moving and capping points. Not much time to settle in, and you can be attacked from so many directions engie camping is VERY hard. (though I do know one spot where I can pull off 25 kills with a sentry if I get lvl 3 and dispenser up)

full 32 man server

Those were the days...
 

The_Ulf

L6: Sharp Member
May 26, 2009
399
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Yep - been working on this myself for a while now.

Did you play Eye of the Storm? I felt the design of that game mode to be perhaps the best of the battlegrounds as the flag provided more of a possibility for turnarounds than AB but still had all the merits
of it.

Artesia got the farthest towards finishing building the game mode in TF2 and you can talk to Boojum about how they got the entity setup working there, but the problem's always been HUD. You need a really good way to represent all the control points and each team's victory point progress (as well as a flag indicator for EotS).

I found that building the entity setup out of a payload race skeleton worked decently well - it gave the best representation of each team's progress and could display 4 control points reasonably well (a fifth in the middle might be hard).
 

FOREVER

L1: Registered
Feb 14, 2011
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Yeah I remember playing canalzone once, it seemed a little sprawling and messy, not to mention 'canal' is much nicer name.

A feature of AB that would be very challenging to replicate is the openness - in it you can see enemies coming from a great distance, which is quite thrilling. But snipers make porting this difficult.

A feature of AB that would be simple to replicate is the parallel objective-taking. When I play tf2 it's mostly with a smaller group of players (2-4) whom I know personally and we often play in larger servers. I don't know how common this experience is, but the game would be way more fun (for us, at least) if the objectives were less linear and more dispersed. Canalzone was going for this, but 8 points (laid out more or less evenly, if I recall) is rather silly. 5 (laid out semi-serially) might also turn out to be silly for tf2, I don't know.
 

FOREVER

L1: Registered
Feb 14, 2011
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I was never a big fan of EOTS, and I don't know if it was because of the horrific visual design of the level or that the ctf+caphold combo didn't quite click for me. Exciting to hear that you have something related in the pipe!
 

ardysqrrl

L4: Comfortable Member
Oct 26, 2009
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the original dom_ game mode involved each point having an associated spawn which you'd get along with capping the point, but that was never done with tf2's canalzone. I'm not sure why not since it seems like a good idea.
 

Trotim

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Jul 14, 2009
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Yeah, this is UT99's Domination game mode. I've always wanted a map like this in TF2. (Same with a Scramble map like the mode in GA.)