View the Mod DB Black Mesa mod for Half-Life 2 image Undertow Ingame Shot. Many will remember it as 'That DM map where you could press the button and flood stuff'. Undertow (Classic) From Team Fortress Wiki. Undertow: Developer(s): Valve: Undertow is a Half-Life map playable in Team Fortress Classic. Half-Life maps.

Bringing a map that’s been played over and over again since 1998 into the modern era is a dangerous business. In this rambly post I’ll be sharing my experience carrying the weight of fifteen years of fond memories and nostalgic familiarity attached to the original Undertow, under the constant threat of becoming that evil monster who ruined my favorite thing and must never be forgiven. TIME TAKES ITS TOLL Undertow was originally released in 1998, long before anyone started churning out online multiplayer shooters that outsell James Cameron films. As such, FPS level design wasn’t an established craft yet, and nobody really knew what they were doing. Matters were only made worse by how little manpower and time went into the original Half Life’s multiplayer mode. Valve was like two dozen dudes sleeping in tents at the base camp of the Mt. Everest of Cash Dollars that they would spend the next 15 years scaling.

Pioneer Premier Deh-p310ub Manual. Subtransit, Boot Camp, Crossfire, Undertow, and Snark Pit were all made by the same designer in a very short period of time. The result was maps that were interesting and unusual by modern standards, since they didn’t follow the “conventional wisdom” that most level designers pick up nowadays, but often very crude and deeply flawed. Our first step when remaking a multiplayer map is to make a “one-to-one” version, which is completely identical to the original, and test it out to see how well it’s held up. So when I first got permission to start on Undertow, that’s exactly what I did. One (1) Undertow, in its original habitat. Unfortunately, it was garbage.

Undertow’s layout, with its flat, empty hallways and sometimes confusing rooms, had not aged well. The reception from our testers was pretty universally negative, both from those who played the original game and those who hadn’t. Later on we got a full server of people and played the original in Half Life, and even in its original context a lot of people just found it boring. Running around barren halls shooting at your friends was revolutionary fifteen years ago, but today people expect more varied and interesting spaces to play in. I saw this as a great chance to take some creative liberties and make something new, a proper redo instead of a direct port with some pretty paint slapped over it. So I started from scratch.

WHAT MAKES AN UNDERTOW? The first challenge I faced with my “remake” was answering two questions: • Why isn’t this map fun? • What makes this map Undertow? In other words: What should I keep to make the map recognizably Undertow, while changing up everything else to make the map fun? The first question was easier than the second. Cheap Pine Sans Font there. N-gage 2.0 N95. The layout was extremely dated and felt very rushed.

I got the feeling that there was a concrete idea for the river, and for the big rooms where it started and ended, but the rest of the map consisted of a bunch of flat, boring gray hallways quickly thrown together to connect those spaces: Four (4) Boring Undertow Hallways, in Half Life These kinds of spaces just aren’t very fun to play in. In addition to being boring to look at, there’s nowhere to run, jump, and hide. Fun gameplay in a modern game requires more variety, different heights let players move strategically to gain the upper hand, little nooks and crannies and side rooms make fights less predictable and add a lot of tactical options, especially when you’re being chased down by a better-equipped player. Every fight in these halls has players shooting and moving straight ahead, without any way to take advantage of the environment. The ideal Undertow would strip away as much of this bland, cramped space as possible in favor of the much more enjoyable big, open spaces that the hallways connect, which leads me to the answer to the second question: One (1) Undertow, Simplified AN UNDERTOW IS BORN The most important and fun areas of Undertow are the three main open areas: the 3-level atrium in the middle (“ Mid”), the room where the river originates from the big vat where the gluon gun lives (“ Vat Room”), and the underground sewer room where the river dumps the players (“ Sewer”). The new Undertow would keep the concepts of those three areas intact, as well as their locations relative to one another, but the new versions would be redesigned from the ground up to be fun, complex places to fight in and explore. The connecting hallway routes would be rerouted through mid and/or turned into bigger interior spaces to get rid of the bland corridors and dump more players into the open areas.