Forgotten Hope Public Forum
Forgotten Hope 2 => Suggestions => Topic started by: Turkish007 on 01-01-2019, 18:01:33
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Good evening fellow FH2 people,
Playing on some older (Mostly North Africa maps), I realized that most people on the server feel like "ugh, not this map again" and leave the server once the map comes up. Some maps seem to have lost their appeal to the players compared to the newer Western and Eastern front maps.
The FH2 mappers have obviously improved themselves as they gained more experienced so the older maps lack some cosmetic features. Some things that come to my mind initially is well distributed grass, stones and detailed rubble, etc... Not to mention that older maps have vanilla BF2 statics in them (like BF2 sandbags and buildings) which are obviously of lower quality compared to the later ones made by FH2 developers.
As far as I remember, a few updates ago Bardia received a facelift. It seems that mostly cosmetic changes have been made like lighting and the skybox (the images on FH2 website belong to the old version, you can compare the current version to it) and even this had drastically recovered Bardia's popularity among players. Less people leaving the server, less complaints in the chat.
And I think it is appropriate to state that one of the things that make FH2 still popular is its high quality content, which some of these maps fail to match cosmetically in my opinion.
Here are some maps that pop into my mind:
Siege of Tobruk
Invasion of Crete
Fall of Tobruk
Mersa Matruh
Operation Supercharge
Mareth Line
All these maps could be given a second chance because some of them have a lot of potential when it comes to gameplay. What do you guys think?
Cheers,
Turkish007
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I love the idea, sadly singleplayer goes out of order if we touch any statics, ie. switching BF2 sandbags to FH2 versions.
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Here are some maps that pop into my mind:
Siege of Tobruk
Invasion of Crete
Fall of Tobruk
Mersa Matruh
Operation Supercharge
Mareth Line
I agree with you on the cosmetic part, but if a map is not "beautiful" (very subjective ofc) but in the meantime it plays well, then the problem is not too big, imo. The work to be done is, however and has several drawbacks (like the SP thing, but also the delay on work on newr maps and fronts).
Personally the maps which need a makeover the most are:
1) Operation Supercharge - balance is totally out of the window. Even if teams are stacked towards the allied side, the Germans will win.
2) Operation Hyacinth - the same, just the teams switched: allies will win this always.
3) Mareth Line - the latest makeover overdid it imo, but bakance is OK-ish.
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I love the idea, sadly singleplayer goes out of order if we touch any statics, ie. switching BF2 sandbags to FH2 versions.
So do you mean the lack of manpower issue applies more so to the singleplayer department rather than the mapping department?
I agree with you on the cosmetic part, but if a map is not "beautiful" (very subjective ofc) but in the meantime it plays well, then the problem is not too big, imo. The work to be done is, however and has several drawbacks (like the SP thing, but also the delay on work on newr maps and fronts).
I do also think that the gameplay issue is overally more important compared to cosmetic issues, but apparently a big group of players think cosmetic issues are much more important. At least many of them leaving the server once a well playing but not so good looking map comes on indicates that.
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So do you mean the lack of manpower issue applies more so to the singleplayer department rather than the mapping department?
You could say so, yes. We currently have only one person who can do navmeshing and he has a ton of other work. And if you ask me, the stuff he is working on is far more important than the single player stuff. But yeah, this has been discussed before and very recently on our discord server too. If we had a person who was willing and capable of facelifting AND navmeshing old maps, we could perhaps consider this option. I personally would love to see some of the older maps getting some love, other than gameplay fixes (which of course are very important too).
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I do also think that the gameplay issue is overally more important compared to cosmetic issues, but apparently a big group of players think cosmetic issues are much more important.
I think it's a bit of both: if gameplay is bad, but the map looks pretty, you might enjoy yourself after all. If the gameplay is bad AND the map doesn't look appealing, then chances are that you quit.
Working gameplay usually doesn't cause people to leave.
I only wrote this because I know the manpower issue: so cosmetics are nice, but they come after gameplay fixes.
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Problem with Mersa is that you basically can't see anything at all with a calibrated screen, and the area between the town and train station is just flat terrain and few inaccessible buildings, just big boxes standing there. Could be improved a lot.
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Yea afaik it comes down to 2 things;
-Singleplayer
-Other work being more important
I’ve wanted to overhaul old maps for a while. But let’s say I spend the time to overhaul Bardia (gameplay aesthetics, the works), then it will need a new navmesh (and probably other SP fixes) or it can’t get released. Otherwise it breaks the singleplayer for all those that still play it (there’s actually a lot).
On top of that, my learning of the editor and how to map would be better spent on making a new map that could use new content. A new map with new toys is better time spent than an overhauling an old map to be slightly better.
In the end the singpleayer is the biggest thing imo. Having mappers who could navmesh each time a map is updated would be ideal, but people with knowledge of BF2 singleplayer is really hard to come by these days. :(
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That's why singleplayer should be ditched and made available as a separate download only for those who are interested.
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^ Maybe a (temporary) solution is to copy maps and keep the SP supported ones unchanged for the time being?
What I mean is, there would be siege_of_tobruk as a facelifted MP map, and siege_of_tobruk_sp as an unchanged SP only map... You could even remove conquest mode from the sp ones so they don't accidentally get included in the rotation by server owners...
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^ Maybe a (temporary) solution is to copy maps and keep the SP supported ones unchanged for the time being?
What I mean is, there would be siege_of_tobruk as a facelifted MP map, and siege_of_tobruk_sp as an unchanged SP only map... You could even remove conquest mode from the sp ones so they don't accidentally get included in the rotation by server owners...
Yes this is possible and would be how i'd approach it. We would of course not remove SP maps from Fh2, people have worked hard to implement that feature, and many of our fans like it.
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I play mostly singleplayer. As the most populated servers are located mainly in Germany or the rest of Europe, removing or diminishing the singleplayer content would be a huge disappointment for many die-hard FH2 fans.
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Can any of you singleplayer fans read tho?
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Can any of you singleplayer fans read tho?
Thats why we are really happy that the maps haven't been changed so that we can continue to enjoy them on our own in our spare time.
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Can any of you singleplayer fans read tho?
*sigh* ::) Yes. Indeed we can. The last singleplayer support map pack for EF maps independent from the official release was not satisfactory at all. I'm sure the official SP developers FH2 could have done a better job at it, that is what I meant.
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Mersa Matruth is great, but the problem with that map is the night. The map must return to the daylight version.
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Why is that an issue?
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Why is that an issue?
Well you basically need an out of spec monitor with too low gamma to see anything. I agree in daylight it was quite nice map, but now it's just meh.
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Yeah, it's pretty with the tracers flying around but the night maps in FH2 are practically unplayable with the settings I typically use. Thankfully there aren't many of them.
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Change your settings then, they seem to be wrong. I have no problem with those maps at all, you just need to adapt your gameplay style to the night environment. For me it makes perfect sense that you are able to hide in the shadows on a night version of Keren for example, but then some people are frustrated they can't snipe people from long distances on those maps, because they can't adapt and they don't use some aspects of those maps in their advantage. Then there are people who play on glossy screens, which are no good for gaming at all, those people should have no right to comment on maps and should be ignored ;D
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I'm with Jan here, I've never had a problem in night maps..