Very few isometric games have verticality, and of those few, not many do it well. So at a very basic level, you have to ask whether elevation matters, or even more basically, what the movement verbs are.
As a counter-example you could take Oblivion (surprise!), which on the surface has much more complex and labyrinthine dungeon layouts, which ends up being completely pointless — there's practically no use of verticality, no meaningful tactical opportunities brought by the level design, no apparent logic behind how the dungeons are built, no real incentive for exploration (which is of course helped by certain other mechanics like level-scaled loot)... You get dungeons that on the surface have several paths through them, but which in reality are just random corridors followed by small, uninteresting rooms that are detached from all other rooms in that dungeon, are utterly dull gameplay-wise (at best you might be able to set up a choke point somewhere or find a spot from where to shoot arrows at enemies a few feet below you), usually serve no apparent purpose in the game world, and in general have no memorable or unique features whatsoever.Of course, many aspects of such good design are orthogonal and actual design may vary wildly in quality of its different aspects.
Take Skyrim, for example.
On one level its dungeons are mostly inexcusably terribad linear room-corridor-room affairs. On another level they also feature some nice z-axis and tend to go off the grid in all directions - including vertically.
Isometric sucks at z-axis, going off the grid and, especially, going off the grid vertically.Is it the same approach with level design when you're making isometric or first person view game?
Blood level design was anything but abstract.Fun, abstract level design, blows boring, linear shit out the water and always will. Blood and Quake 1's level design mops the floor with any of those games with so-called 'Expert' Level Design.
This dipshit clearly (as in "clearly enough to be immediately understood by an ASD person") meant story in terms of architecture and layout with not just game reasons to be the way it is - you know like RL architecture.This dipshit doesn't even understand the meaning of level design and has warped its meaning to reflect his own narrow-minded logic. He asks for a multiplayer level and wants a linear Uncharted level that tells a story. He probably doesn't even understand the meaning of the word gameplay and has confused it with QTEs that "tell a story".
He should spend some time playing certain Doom wads, and maybe he'll understand level design and gameplay.
Yeah. It's the same problem as in the case of Oblivion I mentioned earlier.The problem with #2 is that it's a number of completely separated boxes. Basically you have a good chance that what happens in the box, stays in the box.
MRY Carrion
The problem with #2 is that it's a number of completely separated boxes. Basically you have a good chance that what happens in the box, stays in the box.
Contrast with #4 where you can for example move around outside the circular room and fire into it from two different directions nearly simultaneously.
#3 is poorer, more abstract variant of #4.
#1 is basically "dude, have you ever made a level?", it has got bad scale and level of abstraction (individual structures are only indicated), has no structure to speak of and is going to be completely impractical for DM even when actually built.
Isometric sucks at z-axis, going off the grid and, especially, going off the grid vertically.Is it the same approach with level design when you're making isometric or first person view game?
Blood level design was anything but abstract.Fun, abstract level design, blows boring, linear shit out the water and always will. Blood and Quake 1's level design mops the floor with any of those games with so-called 'Expert' Level Design.
And even actual abstract level design started to include actual recognizable architecture reminiscent of #4 as early as Doom 2 (Doom 1 was entirely randumb non-OSHA-compliant space base and hell stuff that didn't really make you expect any logic, but Doom 2 mixed that with proper architecture):
This dipshit clearly (as in "clearly enough to be immediately understood by an ASD person") meant story in terms of architecture and layout with not just game reasons to be the way it is - you know like RL architecture.This dipshit doesn't even understand the meaning of level design and has warped its meaning to reflect his own narrow-minded logic. He asks for a multiplayer level and wants a linear Uncharted level that tells a story. He probably doesn't even understand the meaning of the word gameplay and has confused it with QTEs that "tell a story".
He should spend some time playing certain Doom wads, and maybe he'll understand level design and gameplay.
You, OTOH, don't even understand the meaning of basic English sentences - illiterate much?
Did I pass the test?
Oh god this made me hard.
When you can tell what it is, it's no longer abstract.Blood's levels vary in abstractness, from levels based off cult horror classics, having massive castles and Hellish levels made from flesh. The architecture for the most part isn't abstract and resembles the locations it tries to portray fairly accurately but the levels are abstract in many ways.
If author wasn't pushing an agenda, he would have made a better choice of games, ones whose gameplay and design goals can be directly compared, and maybe would have put something like Blood's "The Haunting" for #4 as an example of expert level design.
As it is, image was made to support standard agenda: game design has been following an unbroken, linear course of improvement, and a 2016 game is unquestioningly superior piece of design to a 10-15-20 years older game of even comparable type.
...which is not an MP map.If author wasn't pushing an agenda, he would have made a better choice of games, ones whose gameplay and design goals can be directly compared, and maybe would have put something like Blood's "The Haunting"
Those maps are pretty good examples of "boring by necessity". You simply can't have organic maps in PnP due to them being grid based and designers lacking in skill. (Maps of cathedrals/temples don't count because they're supposed to be geometric.)In the interest of promoting discussion about good level design in RPGs or single-player shooters, though, rather than merely bemoaning the dark days we (by and large) live in, let me link to Justin Alexander's Jaquaying the Dungeon article series. It deals with classic D&D dungeon maps and the kind of non-linear design that is appropriate for PnP dungeon crawling in particular, but a lot of the things discussed there are entirely relevant when it comes to cRPGs and basically almost any kind of single-player computer game in which exploration is a relevant element.