You'll often see me coming to the defense of Halo: Reach in response to some of the community's stupidly excessive whaling on it, but there's one aspect of it that I simply cannot defend no matter how hard I try: the maps. The maps in Halo: Reach are simply horrendous and indefensible, and they reflect a sad trend that's been apparent in Halo for quite a while now, which is the steady decline of Halo's map quality.
First, using campaign maps for multiplayer is a fucking terrible idea. This is because multiplayer maps and campaign maps are built with separate goals in mind. Campaign maps are linear experiences that ferry a player from point A to point B in an enjoyable, fun, exciting fashion. It may have some level of variance due to an abundance of routes from beginning to end, but in the end, the goal is always the same. Multiplayer maps, on the other hand, are either dynamic because they require the players to constantly move around to maintain their map control and adjust to the situation at hand, or require the players to fall into some sort of static setup in order to establish a strong map presence that the other team must break.
The only exception to these rules are the random durdle maps in Action Sack, but those need to be symmetrical in order to work, a feature that campaign maps cannot provide because then they would be too fucking boring. This gets its own paragraph, because it leads to another topic: Symmetry. Symmetry is important, because it is vital for establishing balance. One of the reasons why campaign copy-pastes suck is because they aren't symmetrical. Just take a look at the best maps from each game, each of which possesses some form of symmetry (skipping Halo 1 because I didn't play it then): Lockout and Midship. Lockout doesn't really have one, but Snipe Tower and BR Tower are similar enough; they're both well-formed bases with 3 distinct levels. For Midship, Red and Blue are equal. Now Halo 3, Pit, Pit, and more Pit. Again, you have Red and Blue bases, which are equal. For Reach, we sadly pretty much only have Sanctuary, which again, has a Red and Blue base. When maps aren't symmetrical, you have power imbalances that favor whichever team spawns on the better side/is lucky enough to take control of the better side early on. Let's look at High Ground. High Ground is a piece of crap mainly because of its terrible spawns, but also because of how dominant the base is (last 3 words should be "the bases are"). From the base, you have distinct levels, good cover, and a far range weapon (Spartan Laser). You also have the camo to poke around and wreak havoc Beach-side, which is far better than the Overshield because it was nerfed in Halo 3 while the camo was improved and a tank is easily taken down by a good set up. On top of that, you're closer to rockets. Beach side has the sniper, but you can be counteracted by a good Spartan laser user, and your cover isn't as good. There's a half-assed solution to this by making the other team spawn at the back of the base when one team has control of it, but that's just... ugh.
Not only do campaign maps simply not work, they're almost an insult to the players. It's kind of a slap to the face when you wait a couple of months for a new map pack only to see that half of it is non-functional crap, because the developers were fucking lazy and just did a couple simple copy-pastes from their own campaign. Remakes are an exception to the laziness thing, because they bring a level of nostalgia to the experience and, more importantly, have proven their merit time and time again. Also, you don't feel as cheated, because there's usually a little tweaking to improve the map's aesthetic value and make it seem less awkward relative to the other maps (this usually fucks with the map, but hey, it shows that they put some sort of effort into it). Campaign copy-pastes, on the other hand, usually don't have this, because they're ported from the campaign corresponding to the game that they're for. I don't want to play a piece of the Halo 3 campaign in Halo 3 multiplayer, I want to play it in the Halo 3 campaign where it belongs. There's no nostalgia involved, and the map is merely a broken piece of garbage because it's the equivalent of placing a Magikarp in the Sahara desert.
Moving on, my next point is that bases need to come back. If you'll look at some of the most celebrated maps of all time (Lockout, Pit, Midship, Warlock), you'll notice that these maps tend to have distinct bases. Bases are important because they provide some sort of rhythm to the game to prevent it from devolving into a random clusterfuck of constantly running around like most Reach maps do. The rhythm stems from the enabling of skilled teams to showcase their skills by establishing setups and using their superior teamwork and coordination to hold them down, rather than making their position impossible to defend due to the map's stupidly high level of entropy. Bases are also good because they allow for the formation of coherent goals, mainly establishing the strongest setup or breaking the other team's setup, rather than randomly running around and hoping for the best. (Note: A lot of my examples are going to be from Halo 2, because that's when I followed competitive gaming the most). Lockout had Sniper Tower and BR Tower. While the BR tower allowed for less cluttering with your own team (there's only so many positions you can hold at Sniper Tower), this upside was balanced out, because like the names suggest, it didn't have the sniper rifle. Midship had Pink side, red and blue bases, and Carbine side, with the focus lying on Pink 2 because it let you see everything while providing you with a good amount of cover. Lastly, bases are important because they provide distinct, defining structures within the map to keep it from being one massive, durdley blur. This can be illustrated by how easily callouts can be created for a certain map. For Midship, callouts took me about 2 minutes to learn. When my friend Nate taught me them, it went pretty much like this:
Nate: Alright Alex, see all the pink structures on this side of the map? That's Pink Tower. The bottom where the plasma pistol spawns is Pink 1. Pink 2 is the little room above that. Pink 3 is what's above the Pink room and the left and right shoulders of this level as well.
Me: Oh, ok, that's pretty intuitive.
Nate: The bases are Red and Blue base, and they each have 2 levels, so they're called Red 1/Red 2 and Blue 1/Blue 2 respectively.
Me: Ok, got it.
Nate: Directly across from Pink side is Carbine side, which is called Carbine side, because that's where the Carbine spawns. The base level that isn't really a level is called Car 1, the little room with the explodey thingies and the Carbines is Car 2, and the top level which has little to no cover whatsoever is Car 3.
Me: Simple enough.
Nate: Lastly, the bottom part where the lifts and shotgun are is called bottom mid, and the top structure connecting Car and Pink is called Top Mid (it's where the sword is as well). Now we're done.
Me: Sweet!
See how easy this was? Even though Nate got these from watching MLG and reading their forums, they were all very intuitive, and we easily could have derived similar names on our own if we needed to. Now let's take a lot at the very brief window of time when Nate, my friend Rajan, and I tried coming up with callouts on the fly for Countdown (don't exactly remember how it went since it was a while ago, but the gist of it is in here):
(Rajan gets outDMRed and tries to call out the guy's location)
Rajan: Alright, I just got killed, but I got the guy one-shot.
Me: Alright cool, where is he? I'm pretty near your X, since I think I can catch him.
Rajan: He's uh... running into that room.
Nate: Which room? There's like a billion of them. This map is just rooms and narrow hallways.
Rajan: The room that's sort of big on the second level... or something. Now he's in that skinny hallway.
Me: But everything's a skinny hallway.
Rajan: FUCK IT, I DON'T KNOW, FUCK THIS GAME. His shields are back anyways, so derp.
Me: BAWWWWWWWWWWW.
Now let's look at a couple of maps that don't have bases. First up, Citadel, one of Bungie's shameless campaign copy-pastes for Halo 3. While Citadel clears a good amount of the obstacles to be a good multiplayer map (symmetrical, small to mid-sized, arena-style), it doesn't work because there's no bases: It's just 2 donuts stacked on top of one another with a bottom mid. More importantly, rockets are propped up on a super open pedestal bottom mid, which leads to a lot of the combat revolving around bottom mid, something that is NEVER good. As a result, Citadel was a random clusterfuck. Second, let's take a look at Countdown from Halo: Reach. Yes, I know that this map is in MLG, but I still think it's absolutely terrible, and it really is just used because there aren't very many other options. Like Citadel, it's just a bunch of donuts stacked together, but with 3 instead of 2. Since pretty much EVERYTHING is a hallway, far-range combat isn't very encouraged because your line of sight is usually obstructed by the wall of whatever stupid hallway you're in. Movement between the donut levels is also awkward and not fluid because lifts suck (slow and you can't control your motion as you're going up them) and so do stairs (fuck up your nades real hard).
Since Halo 3, the balance between maps sizes seems to have shifted, favoring the large ones. While this worked in Halo 1 because the pistol was a fucking long-range powerhouse, this doesn't work in Halo 3 and beyond because since Halo 3, there's been an emphasis on close-range combat. Halo 2's close range weapon arsenal was the shotgun and sword. Halo 3 doubled that with the addition of the mauler and gravity hammer. It then went on to encourage close-range combat by upping the melee damage to retard levels (full shield's worth of damage for a fucking punch = WRONG) and making the AR a close range powerhouse (4 bullet AR spray + beatdown = WRONG). It then discouraged far range combat by introducing bullet spread and removing hit scan. Halo: Reach kept up the trend by keeping the stupidly high melee damage and unintentionally introducing herpa-derping. Even though it got rid of spread and brought back hit-scan, it fucked everything up with the bloom. Halo maps desperately need more small to mid-sized members nowadays, since they are universally wonderful, both in competitive and casual play. Every Halo needs a Midship and/or Warlock, no questions asked.
In summary, campaign copy-pastes need to die, symmetry is awesome, bases need to come back, and small to mid-sized maps is an endangered species that needs to be revived. The Halo 4 maps I've seen so far seem pretty lackluster, but they usually don't spoil the best maps in the Betas, so I have hope. Now it's time to rip on some Reach maps with short, mean descriptions:
Zealot: Two giant purple donuts stacked on top of on another with awkward lifts, textures to fuck with your nades hard, and no good distinct structures.
Countdown: Zealot but it's gray and brown with infinite hallways, and 3 donuts instead of 2. Pass.
Boardwalk: Too big and not symmetrical.
Spire: Too big and it's like 2 levels awkwardly smashed together. The Spire also doesn't really interact with the rest of the map and vice-versa.
All the other Big Team maps which I can't remember: BRING BACK VALHALLA.
Caged: The base is fucking tiny, it's super random, there's no symmetry, and from what I've seen, it revolves too much around the god spot montage kids abuse. There's a reason Ivory Tower was taken out of Halo 2 MLG: Its focus was a singular narrow as hell hallway. But in Caged, we have a box. Yay.
Swordbase: Too big, not symmetrical, too many rooms/hallways, and instead of having bases that interact with the rest of the map, you have 2 massive enclosed buildings.
I can't remember the rest. Meh.
On a final note, NEVER make a map anything like Halo 2's Backwash, which is almost without a doubt the worst map of all time. One giant boring, homogeneous blob with limited visibility and no well-formed distinct structures = failure of a gaming experience.
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