It's great how you've got options to tackle a route. There's probably an optimal route, I assume, but it's fun that you don't have to go down one corridor.
TL;DRMax hasn't worked out an optimal route; the level design offers varied cover and engagement ranges for different playstyles, with hand-placed AI inside the instance, praised as the team's good work.
If there is an optimal route, I've not worked it out. I'll let Mr. Kraken make a guide for it, and then I'll know.
Yeah, and that's what we try to think about as well, from an environment and especially from a level design perspective: okay, where are the covers? Are they very close to each other? And then based on that, you kind of get a play space that works very well for shotguns or SMGs, close-range weapons.
Plenty of variety of engagement, I guess, right?
Yeah, so just to make sure that we cater to the different play styles that players have.
But also, it's added challenge, right? If you're always doing shotgun stuff, you just bring a shotgun and do that, but you have to kind of have a bit of variety within the team, make sure you're covering all bases.
Yeah. That's why we create these protected pockets where the AI is really hunkered down, and now it's like, ah, there's a big open area in front of it.
Yeah, and actually, if there's an opportunity to do it, I think the level design team that has worked on this mandate has been so exceptional. We had a lot of work. The AI inside of this instance is actually all hand placed, which is something we don't do anywhere else in the game. We spawn all our AI through spawn closets. Instancing allows us to hand place AI and assign them defend areas, give them all of their settings, hand placed in editor, which is super helpful for development going forward. But once we tried to start doing it, there were a number of problems that arose. They had a lot up against them, and they got it done in record time. They really did an amazing job with this. So shout out to Manuel, John, Marcus. They did an amazing job.
Yeah. We built this together with the team in Germany, and they really smacked it. Level design, the environment, my environment guys in Germany were super proud of how it all came together.