My second mini article about level building.

Places and Paths

A Place is where actions happen. It’s a battlefield. Some people who design maps call it a "node." Often times these coincide closely with Landmarks. In Pinnacle, the dish is both a landmark and a Place. On Zanzibar in Halo 3, Generators meant both a landmark and a Place. Places are not always landmarks, though. Think about Asylum. There are not a whole lot of Landmarks in Asylum, but there are tons of great Places for battles. Places encourage people to stay put and fight. On the other hand, Paths encourage people to move.

Paths are walkways that connect important locations (Places). These are your bridges, hallways, paths through the forest of trees, ramps, mancannons, openings in cover, etc. This is where you are if you are not in a Place.

A person on a Path will continue on that Path, because by nature, people don’t want to stop on a Path. In fact, upon reaching the end of a Path, a person will tend to continue in the same direction he was moving when on the Path. Use this to your advantage. Do not put important places right around the corner of where a Path ends, people won’t look there. That’s why campers (like me) camp right at the end of Paths. At the end of your Paths, have an important location easily visible. If you do this, you have a lot of power over the way people navigate your map.

Don’t have Paths to nowhere. This will make players hate you. This is like telling a joke but leaving off the punchline. Paths should all lead somewhere worth going. If you have a Path that leads to a dead end alley, then there better be the coolest thing in the world at the end to make up for all the backtracking the player is about to have to do.

You can control the cadence of your map by controlling the ratio and size of your Paths and Places. When you watch a well made movie, it has a certain pace carefully crafted to help create the experience the filmmaker wanted. Action movies have faster cuts and shorter periods of downtime, while dramas can stay in the same scene for a while, building things up more slowly. Map builders have a similar type of control.

Short Paths with small Places will make the pace faster, and more hectic. Too much of this will make a player feel like he has little control, though. Long Paths and long Places make the game feel more epic with slower, bigger battles. Too much of this will eventually wear on a player, making him bored. Too much of any one thing will make a player lose interest. Mix things up. Maybe have a medium Path to a small Place, that has a short Path to a bigger Place. Mixing it up well will make players say things like, “There’s a good balance of short and long range gameplay going on in this map.”

"But wait," you may be saying. "Hemorrhage doesn't have any Paths, and it plays great [sic]."

To which I respond, "Yes."

Big outdoor maps usually have a lot of Places with few Paths. What they do have, though, is Edges. That's coming up next.