ns2_kodiak
Calego
Join Date: 2013-01-24 Member: 181848Members, NS2 Map Tester
Join Date: 2013-01-24 Member: 181848Members, NS2 Map Tester
Alright, Every time I've asked people in game what they disliked about the map they've just said "It's bad" and then moved on. So I'm seriously asking here, what is wrong with ns2_Kodiak?
I've not played enough to formulate any opinion other than "it's different."
I've not played enough to formulate any opinion other than "it's different."
Comments
I just hate all the grass and trees in Kodiak, it looks ugly!
Honestly it's a great map. I've already had some crazy fun games on it since it's release and despite that people complain without any good reason.
"That game was impossible, we traded tech points so many times and the game took an hour and a half boo hoo"
You'd think after the plethora of 8 minute games you have to sit through in an evening to get a decent game going people would appreciate the occasional hard fought battle. Kodiak Provides this by being unfamiliar and hard to control. People are just boring, that's probably not going to change.
The map isn't perfect mind you, it of course has some small balance things that need to happen and Loki is working on that but the basics are working great and it's fun and fresh.
I understand where you're coming from though. Complaining about something without giving it a fair chance or providing decent feedback is lame. In my honest opinion the community as a whole has not spent enough time on the map to appreciate and understand it properly. Hell even I haven't and it's been my favorite map since before @loki finished the whole north side of the map, control and asteroid tracking.
Rooms are hard to control on Kodiak. The only tech point that can turtle at all is asteroid tracking and that's a good thing. It makes tech trading common and gives aliens a chance to get all three hive upgrades without getting the biomass to snowball a victory which is cool. Central is hard for marines to fight in but having a strong presence there is brutally useful; having a phase there makes it super hard to hold anything on the south side of the map for the aliens.
It probably has all sorts of balance problems that I'm not aware of but frankly I don't care. The map is FUN and @loki is still at it so the balance will get better over time.
I think that Hydro is the key position for the rines. Get that and never lose it and you can pressure Hives all day long. But if they never reach it, you need a base in the south of the map or near the middle RT. But the last base isn't very good. It can save you access to Hangar, but it takes too long to go to Command or surface.
It is a difficult map and I would say I enjoy more rounds on it then I don't. What about a sneaky route out of the MS? A vent that leads into the rocks, so you can be lucky and sneak out or flank the aliens covering the entrance to the NW?
Kodiak looks good, but I get less fps than on Biodome. That doesn't make it easier to track aliens in all that green or leap hunt JPs
too many large wide open rooms
don't like the layout of the map (RTs & TPs)
the shrubbery is way overdone
large advantage to aliens outdoors
did i mention the lag?
I find it exceptionally well-balanced, easy to figure out how to play, and with plenty of routes that offer opportunities for rushes and counterplays.
It's perfect for larger public servers; I found in playtests that games would often go to the highest of all tech for both teams, even if one team started off in the lead. It's pretty easy for either team to gear up and make a concerted push to take a location at any point in the game.
I find it funny that people are complaining about the outdoors, wide open areas, and saying that they favour aliens. Are you serious? Wide open areas favour the melee class? Sure, shrubbery obscures your vision. But it also obscures theirs. And unlike the cover in many other popular maps, vegitation doesn't stop bullets.
The performance issue is unfortunate, though not one that I experience.
I hope someone asks me why I think it plays like tram. Or just thinks about it and realises that it does and they need to stop being a whiny old man afraid of new things.
Are you kidding? 3 words:
Parasite; Lerk spikes.
I quite like kodiak, though I'd really like to try some comp games on it (and it's difficult to persuade 2 whole teams to give it a try several times over, not least because we all want to practice on maps that are relevant to the current NSL season finals).
What I hate about it can be summed up in one word: performance. Even on low settings with an overclocked i5 4670K at 4.4GHz and GTX780 super jetstream (also overclocked), I get dog-slow performance on it. That makes me not want to play it, because dropping significantly below 120fps on a 120Hz lightboost monitor is the absolute definition of 'horrible.' I could disable lightboost to make it less painful, but really, I shouldn't have to just to play 1 NS2 map...
The layout also has issues. Its either a Hulk smash type of game where aliens can only hit you from 1 direction or you are stuck responding to shit at complete opposite ends of the map. Very easy to route block as marines and cut off huge sections of the map.
Performance I can understand. But I don't get the feeling that the wide open areas (that really aren't very wide open, with all the rocks everywhere) favor aliens excessively. Marines are better snipers than lerks in general, plus that's only one life form, whereas everyone on marines has at minimum a pistol. I think the open areas are actually remarkably well done in that regard. Aliens stand a chance, but marines can still use their range to their advantage.
I've noticed that the map is quite ARC friendly, but that's just something else that makes it different, as marines tend to have a hard time defending rts (in my limited experience).