Terrain Discussion: Verticality

One thing that’s been brought up often, but especially something I’ve pondered recently is verticality and how it varies in the 3 games.

If you go back to something like Wolfenstein 3D, that game had zero verticality; all the maps were single floors although they could be complex in other ways, the lack of having multiple heights made them less interesting than shooter levels would become. Even with Id’s follow-up; the classic Doom (which I still play to this day thanks to GZDoom and a very healthy community making WADs for it even as I type this), which did have some verticality, this was more of an engine trick due to how things were made in the engine. Since then, most games have some degree of multiple heights on their maps, and this creates a more dynamic battlefield. The idea of grabbing the high ground in battle has existed long before it was a thing in video games, but it’s often crucial in our shooters.

Having high and low ground on maps can add a lot of tactical depth to the game and can add interesting avenues to engage in the battle. One reason I love Crash Course from the original GW is that it has several houses and other buildings, many of which are easier to get to the roofs than most other GW maps, and has that trench in the middle of the map that runs under the bridge that connects the subdivision from the golf course; this gives the map lots of ways to fight, lots of cover, and the battles can take place in many different spots. This map is one of my all-time favorites in any shooter for this exact reason.

The maps in the original GW were heavily based on the original PvZ and the modern era of PvZ2. So, lots of rooftops as barring the cartoony art style, the setting itself is fairly mundane, which is a large part of the original game’s appeal. It has houses, restaurants, the tops of other buildings, and so on as you fight over burger joints, taco restaurants, a hardware store, and so on. This creates a lot of high and sometimes low, ground to battle over. The biggest issue in the original GW is that only 2 classes can reliably get on roof tops; Foot Soldiers and Peashooters. You can of course use abilities and tricks to get up there; use healing stations, tackle dummies, and tall-nut barricades to jump up upon or fly yourself up there on your drone as a Cactus or Engineer but it’s not easy and you often get shot down if the other team notices this. This is one of the reasons the meta in GW1 is dominated by these 2 classes, there are other reasons of course; like how powerful a fully upgraded Super Commando zombie is and how nasty a Toxic Pea is, but being able to get to high ground so easily and often means you can survey a lot of the battlefield and often dominate it, especially with teammates doing the same. It can also be frustrating as other characters to deal with this, especially as a Chomper with no chomp cannon option. This was addressed better in later maps such as Cactus Canyon and the aforementioned Crash Course, but if you login to GW today you will see a more foot soldiers and peashooters than in either GW2 or BfN.

GW2 made high ground easier to get to for more classes and other new things like Super Brainz’s extra high jump that lets him get on the high ground and Kernel Corn using Husk Hop to get up high were added. Chompers can swap their goop for the chomp cannon to give rooftop campers a nice surprise, and the old GW tricks mostly work (although more difficult to use the drone trick), but they made the high ground more easily accessible in general, especially on the low gravity maps. This means that GW kept that all-important verticality but also made it so it wasn’t only certain classes that can get up there reliably, and for those that may have more difficulty than others, at least there’s an option to deal with them; and let’s face it, one-shotting a Scientist, whether on a roof or not, with chomp cannon is so enjoyable!

BfN also made the high ground far easier to get to, but there’s also some players who found an exploit to get to high ground on Peachy District and Goopy Gully that you can’t even fly a drone up too! Barring that issue, while the game does have high ground and tries to balance it better for more classes, as well as giving Chompers the slobber shot (which they use a little too much really), the high ground isn’t as common as it used to be, making the maps ‘flatter’ in engagements which when paired with the lack of flanks only exacerbates the situation, or the high ground is absolutely critical for the current fight; look at the electric station and final point of Loggy Acres to see what I mean about the latter. I do like that they were trying to make the high ground more accessible for players without feeling forced to switch classes, but there is generally not enough of it, or it dominates even worse than before since now you can have a healer or 2 up there with you, and then add overheal and shields and it’s awful. That first point on Peachy District if you’re attacking as the zombies and the plants camp the house directly in front of the point (right side as the zombies, after the smaller house that is very near the spawn point) is a nightmare worse than anything in GW with a Citron, a Sunflower or 2, and one other plant. Even a well-placed ZPG can fail to clear it and its position means it can dominate both flanks as they can snipe you before you can get to cover behind the houses on the far left.

We can discuss flanks and other map aspects in another post, as this one is getting very long, but it’s also very important. If a map has too little high ground, the team that takes it can dominate the map; if it has too much, that makes the map a chore to navigate through. Also adding some low ground, like tunnels and sewers, can give teams other places to fight. For example; one of my all time favorite maps in Tf2 is 2_Fort; which has identical forts with sniper perches facing across the main level with that trench and tunnels, giving you 3 levels to fight on and you can avoid the snipers by going through your tunnels through to the opposing base, use teleporters engineers set up, risk the run across the middle, or rocket jump up there and take the snipers out. And those are just the basic ways. That gives so many options and we need more of that in GW3.