News - Still The Biggest Gameplay Issue With The Warzone 2i Beta. Spawn Feedback
Throughout the first weekend of the beta. I spent a couple hours doing nothing but watching spawns, analyzing spawns, and figuring out how the spawn logic is currently working, and I was able to gain quite a bit of insight into how the spawns are working as well as problem areas or what I see as problem areas with the current spawn design.
No squad spawns!
One thing I have noticed in common with that newer Infinity W-style spawn system is that the general spawn area of a team is very dynamic, and it's constantly moving around the map even when there's very little pressure put on those spawns.
General issues & observations
And this leads to a variety of issues in my mind the first issue is quite basic but quite important in my opinion at least when the spawns are moving around so dynamically, there often isn't that clear distinction especially for the average to below average players out there isn't a clear distinction between this is my team side of the map that's the enemy team side of the map and if I want more action and I want to take a risk I can push toward the enemy side of the map where they're spawning, that increases the action and the risk that I'm taking but also the potential reward there's more kills to go around if I push in that area but there's also more people that keep popping up around, that could potentially kill me at any time oras if I want the opposite if I want to pull back a little bit I can do that and that will yield less action because I'm pulling back toward the side of the map that my team controls.
Now that is a fairly basic description of it but that's generally how things worked back in the day especially playing the original Modern Warfare 2 on these Maps, it was always very easy to tell that this is my side that's the enemy side and I should be clear it's not like the spawns couldn't flip back in the day either of course they could still flip if you pushed way too hard or if too many people pushed up toward their spawn, but the problem with the newer style of Spawn system is it's just constantly moving around the map it'll flip at the slightest sign of pressure, and that makes it really difficult to nail down the general direction that the enemies should be coming from at any given time and it also does take away from that ability to balance your risk and reward appropriately.
If you're trying to push up toward the enemy spawn and take that higher risk, well, too bad you're just pushing their spawn to a different area of the map now, even though you didn't even get that close to their spawn location. And it's like a dog constantly chasing his tail, like you'll just never quite be able to catch up with that spawn, and let's take a look at just one example of this happening on Skid Row.
Example 1 - too easy to push spawns out
In this situation right here, I've got my team spawning toward the top side of the map, and everything looks perfectly normal.
We don't have much map control here, but we still have plenty of space there to fight back. There's plenty of safe spawns where there's no way the enem is getting a line of sight on those spawns, and yet suddenly my team starts spawning over in this area spawnshere, and if we play forward just a little bit further, you can see why that flip occurred.
It's because this enemy pushed up right here now that enemy isn't putting, that much pressure on our spawn typically in an older style Call of Duty game that's not even close to enough pressure to be forcing a spawn flip and I think rightfully so again like I said there's plenty of safe spawn areas within that top side of the map still there's lots of room for us to still make decisions and fight back and I could see perhaps that pressure pushing the spawn maybe a little bit more toward the corner of the map inside the building, while still being on the same side of the map instead it decided to flip us all the way out to the opposite end of the map spawning behind the enemy team now and that's a nice example here of spawns being just too flippy.
It takes away from that player's ability to put himself in that high-risk, high-reward situation.
Example 2 - absolute chaos
Example 3 - domination flags are useless again
And that's a huge issue it's one of the reasons that I don't play domination in Modern Warfare 2 despite the fact that it's always been my favorite game mode in Call of Duty what's the point of playing domination, when it's basically Team Deathmatch but there happen to be Flags around the map that you could capture if you feel like it but they don't have any impact on how much map control you hold or where your team is going to spawn so let's have a look at another example kind of a similar example here as well on a state, this time my team holds c and b and we can see there is one enemy that's now pushed up between C and B right around the B flag there however my team still has full control over this backs spawn area where two teammates have recently spawned, there is no real pressure put on this spawn this is a perfectly safe spawn and it's absolutely where my team should continue to spawn in this situation.
And if not there, there's the alternative of the seab building; they could spawn behind the seab building, right out of the line of sight of that player and also far enough away that that's not really a risk to them, and yet guess where they spawn. Right in the enemy spawn is the only flag that they hold for absolutely no reason whatsoever, so this is just another example of how there is very little attachment to the flag that you hold in dominance.
The main improvement needed
And also the spawns were far too flippy in the first weekend of the beta and this is the number one area I feel they need to be working on when it comes to spawns, for all game modes I think they need to be a whole lot more sticky than they currently are that includes Team Deathmatch domination even hardpoint although I'll admit I haven't done quite as much analysis on hardpoint but I've also noticed a fair number of split spawn situations on hardpoint, that didn't really make much sense, but then on top of that for Domination specifically I'd like to see much heavier attachment to the flags that you own now obviously we don't want to take it so far in the other direction that extreme spawn trapping ends up happening.
I definitely don't want to see that either, but at this point we are so far in the opposite direction, and it really needs to be coming in the stickier direction when it comes to spawns.
No primary spawn zones = poor map flow
Now, on a similar note, sticking to the more general things that I've noticed with the spawn design in this game, this is with this style of spawn system where it's able to just flow all around the map and there doesn't really seem to be set primary spawn locations, where the game's going to try to anchor you to that spawn more often than not unless there's a lot of pressure put on it.
