The new black map set
Is everybody overall really okay with the new style of black maps? Chucking the competitive maps into the casual for-everybody mapset just doesn't sit right with me personally. These maps are not fun to play casually. So far in this set I've played the first 3, targeting silver medals and here's my experience so far:
- Argenitna is a series of precision tricks in a row with a bullshit randomizer at the end. It took me 2 days to get a clean run and that was a silver. It was frustrating to learn, kinda fun to play until I started getting to the end and kept losing really good runs to the "hit the tiny gate on ice while being propelled by a red booster your are forced to approach from an awkward angle" nonsense.
- I got the silver on Saudi Arabia in like 30 minutes, thanks all heavens, but it was not fun in any way shape or form. The entire level seems to be designed to kill any sense of flow. The whole idea of putting speed checks after relatively low speed windy-turny sections is an anti-player design in my mind. Here's my philosophy on it: if I suck in that area I'll end up slow after. And that's a sufficient punishment for not doing it well. If I then end up having to restart because of a speedcheck, that's just the level designer laughing in my face, telling me "ha ha ha, you suck and I knew you'd be slow here".
- And I'm currently on Norway, which combines the previous two. There are fairly long sections with fun driving, but in bewteen are gimmicky flow killer sections and those two bullshit jumps. Here's my problem with them: they are specifically set up to be annoying. If you keep your speed you'll overshoot. If you overshoot there are gaps specifically there to fuck you. How do I know this is not an oversight but an intentional fuck you to the player? The little curved section on the inside if you overturn by a bit. If whoever made this nightmare just figured, "hey, let's put in two degrees of precision, angle of turning and slowing down in the air, it'll be fun", that wouldn't be there. But they tested it, saw that overturning would be a common miss and added the little curved bullshit to make sure there's no lucky bounce to get the player back on the track. This doesn't affect pro players, in a match if they overturn the jump they are out either way. This is just there as a fuck you to casuals.
I don't mind hard maps. I'm working my way through getting author medals in black tracks in every camapign and on some of those I happily spent weeks. But these levels are intentionally designed to be frustrating to the casual player. So why are they in the campaign that is supposed to be for the general community? Competitive maps have been like this for ages and I love watching the pros tackle them, but I never once got the urge to download and try it myself. Now if I want any sense of completion on the campaign I'm forced to deal with the bullshit.
Not fun.
EDIT: Further evidence that the issue with these is not the difficulty, but the tracks not being fun to drive:
This is my result going for silver. A few things to note that add up to support my conclusion:
- It's not a good time, duh, silver.
- It's 17th in Hungary
- I'm a rather weak player, I don't have a specific number, but let's say 500th in Hungary for argument's sake.
Let's put these together: There are hundreds of players in the region who could get this time or better with less effort than I. Many of them pretty easily. They just don't play the track. Some of them maybe because the campaign is new and they just haven't gotten to it, but there's a lot of them, I'd say many of them just don't like driving it.