Rant about Caves

I came up with a rant about cave missions... because it seems like every time I turn around, I have to go through a stupid cave mission to complete my contact mission. And it doesn't matter if it's CoH or CoV, I'm spending more time UNDER the city than IN it.

So here's the article, along with the top five reasons why cave missions are a pain.

"I Hate Caves"

Please feel free to comment or share.

I don't hate caves.
I dislike them.

I hate Council/5thColumn maps more.
For as bad of a rap that the "layer cake room" has, I actually don't mind it at all.
The "Fish Hatchery/Swimming Pool" Council room, though, I hate, alongside of thier IKEA bunkers.

But this is just opinion though.

HATE.

I hate the kind of caves you get in Talos and PI. Specifically the long halls. The cake room is sorta fun actually though, but it's the miles of damn corridors that suck sucktastical suckiness.

Especially now with so many MM's running around.

I actually like the kind of caves the Hollows has. Those are plenty wide to maneuver and travel and yet retain the caveness feel.

I truly wish they would replace the former with the latter.

Blue caves suck. The rest of them aren't so bad, or at least not so numerous, but blue caves just blow chunks. You can always count on hearing "Ugh, caves" when entering one on a team, and if there are a couple of MMs in there too, it's just compounded. I've been on several teams that all decided "Yeah, let's do another mission instead of futzing around in this cave".

I agree, make them rare maps. Then it'll be more like "Hey, a blue cave! Cool!"

I don't mind blue caves. I don't mind brown caves. I don't mind grey caves.




I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate HATE Arachnoid caves. For some reason, I always become a little disoriented in them.

I hate any map that's pointlessly labyrinthine, including certain cave maps - the mineshaft cave maps, as you call them. There are actually quite a few cave maps I enjoy, like the Cimeroran tombs, and small wide caves (even though they're a bit boring).

But as I see it, the problem is really any map that forces me to take some circuitous route that doesn't serve any game play purpose.

The office maps with the obvious hallways leading to dead ends and small, out of the way doors providing the way forward. The Council maps with the huge, sectioned-off bunker rooms and weird, multi-layered water chambers where the map is actually counterproductive. Lab maps with forking elevator paths and long, time-wasting dead ends. Sewer maps that circle me back to the direction I came from.

I think they all need to be re-done. Every map they've created in the last few years has been great. Very linear, not confusing at all, and mostly logical. The university tutorial map, Cimeroran caves, Midnighter Club, and the Preatorian underground and lab maps. Remake the remaining maps with that same mind set. The most disappointing thing about Praetoria in my opinion was that the office maps were just re-skinned rather than re-done.

My point of view on this is that the game is not a maze game, and even if it were these are not good mazes. There's no point in having anything complicated about the way maps are laid out, except if it serves a specific game play purpose. I shouldn't wander down a hallway and find out it's a dead end - the fun here is not to find my way to the objective, but to actually engage the objective. The map should provide a satisfying story context for the mission, and facilitate leading me to the objective while engaging spawns along the way. If they want to get fancy, I can encounter rooms where the layout plays into the engagement, but until they provide meaningful environmental interaction, which I'm guessing would take some engine work, don't make it complicated or difficult for me to reach the room's spawns.

I hate the blue cave especially. Despite having memorized all the "parts" that make up the map, and generally knowing where I should and shouldn't go, I simply can't get down the twitch button reaction that is needed to move at more than 15mph in those narrow hallways without getting stuck on a small pebble.

At least with the other maps I can generally blaze through them once I got their general construction figured out. But no. Not the caves. They need to be all damn SPECIAL.

Special mention goes to the "Lab" map. There's this random part where the stairway you need to go is in some dark, purple hallway that's like, in the damn wall and I can almost never find it until the map is on FIRE and you have 2 minutes to gtfo.

I dont like the small, claustrophobia inducing paths in the caves. I like the look and feel but its to easy to get stuck in there and its very hard to get an unobstructed view of the fight. If the caves were more open, with larger paths and more room to manuever, but with the same textures they would be much improved in my mind.

I like caves well enough, but the only room I hate in them is the multi-tier one that's usually the final room. People tend to fall down levels all the time there, and it's hard to find mobs sometime. I usually start working towards the bottom, and then work my way back up, and to the top.

I always liked the caves, but then I've also spent hundreds if not thousand of hours playing Morrowind.

I'm just glad that I don't need a light source to navigate them, and that if I go splashing through a puddle I don't have to be concerned about a foe hearing me.

I loathe the Arachnoid caves. Ugh.
The mineshaft caves I can take or leave, though the cake room does tend to drive me a bit wonky.
Troll caves are fine as long as it's not the BOSTON MARATHON TO REACH ATTA cave.
Cimeroran caves are nice too.
But I would throw the devs a party at Tavern on the Green if they ever get rid of the Nazi Fish Farm.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

I remember leading the following anecdote from Diablo 2.

A friend of mine was playing through one of the Lut Golein randomly-generated crypts, when he fought his way down a very long hallway. He killed plenty of enemies, only to reach a dead end, stop and get nailed by a spike trap. "What was the point of this corridor?" he asked, to which I shrugged "Well, there was a spike trap at the end." "Oh, that's like some kind of reward, then?" Yeah, I didn't think my response all the way through.

At the same time, I prefer seeing dead ends. It makes a map seem more believable and less like the rail on a rail shooter. No, they don't serve a practical purpose, in that there's no reason to explore them... Unless you want to, and I do. But they serve to make the map feel more like a branching path than a no side paths, no exploration, no freedom linear corridor from set-piece battle to set-piece battle. I grew up playing Diablo and Diablo 2, and both games had randomly generated maps. They had plenty of dead ends, loops and weird geometry, such as two squares of disembodied wall... With a door on it. Generally, I prefer maps that feel random, partly because they feel less "staged" and partly because they're harder to predict.

Regular maps I can predict, simply because there are only a limited number of layouts, and I remember them all. Praetorian maps I can predict because they always, always, ALWAYS feature only a single, linear path from the entrance door to whatever it is I have to kill. The most creative they ever get is if they branch a corridor for 50 feet and loop both sides into the same room anyway. I literally squee every time I see a tunnels or grey labs corridor branch off and lead to two separate rooms. And I really shouldn't.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't mind dead ends so much, I just hate the clutter. A lot of the time the dead ends seem like they are supposed to be there, regardless of whether or not there's something to KILL there. The office building is the best example of this I can think of. It's an office building. There's offices. No, badguys aren't in every single room, but I'd be a bit perplexed to never run into little rooms where the hapless citizens might play pong when they aren't being held hostage by Skullz.

Maybe make the clutter in maps less... Rigid. I feel infinitely silly as a SUPER HERO when I'm stuck on a small rock or a desk and not incinerating it with my mind like I should be.

While I am no big fan of some of the caves, I have hated the layer room since I first set foot in it. I am getting better at it, but I still curse when ever I realize it will be the end section of a very long map that was not a kill all.

In some places in Oranbega I feel the need to widen the corridors are spread out the spawns. Those corridors where there are 3 spawns are annoying as hell for a melee character.