Level design case study: COD MW’s Shoot House
🔸 Introduction
In the history of COD franchise, there have been a lot of maps designed for PvP multiplayer experience but have you ever thought «why» players like only a limited number of them?
What’s the story behind those maps? And why should we think about them?
I’m Amin, a multiplayer level designer and In this article I wanna take one of those recent popular maps, «Shoot House» from COD: Modern Warfare 2019 (developed by Infinity War) and analyze it in five cases.
💡 Note: This analysis is extremely expandable for other multiplayer maps from variant games. «Shoot house» is just a case study here.
🔸 Thinking about WHYs
Every designer (especially a level designer) should ask these WHYs from themselves and start a challenge for reaching something meaningful or even something empty. Both of them have the same value in our career life and we should care about them.
We as a designer are always trying to think about the success or failure of everything in any field and use their pros and cons in our design process. Like mistakes, strength and weak points, etc.
In this article, I’m here to talk about the reasons of success of a multiplayer map which became a very popular and favorite map in the period of time that it was released in 2019. (still popular though)
So… let’s jump right into it!
💡 Note: Shoot House is a multiplayer PvP map, so be aware this article is NOT relevant to singleplayer or co-op mode.
💠 1- Layout Roots!
There is an interesting method (credit to Ben Bauer) for finding the basic pattern of every layout. Here’s the tip: Just simplify and downgrade it to the ground!
Yeah, ignore the visual arts and convert it to simpler pieces. I did it for Shoot House map and reached its beautiful old root. Guess what is it?
That’s right! It’s the old man: «fy_Iceworld»
«Iceworld» is a legacy community map was designed for Counter-Strike back in 2001. It has a very simple cubic layout that no one would probably care about but when this map got under touch of players it completely shook the whole community of CS! It was even hilariously fun with bots and only god knows the play time of this map and other similar ones came out after that so far! (more details)
The designers of Shoot House, intentionally or unintentionally, were trying to reach a layout which be simple with straight paths like iceworld as much as possible. They should definitely apply some creative changes to make that a unique map but as you know, it has a lot of killing risks! Major changes might cause balancing issues, camping spots and so on. So they did their best to keep the experience fresh and fast without bringing new problems. Almost!
Further, I’ll talk about the advantages of this magic layout. Keep reading!
💠 2- Easy To Learn
It’s so important for every multiplayer map, no matter if it’s new or inspired, to be easy to understand after one or two rounds play. If you dig into a complex or mysterious plan, you better switch to singleplayer modes.
When you play Shoot House, you probably figure out how easy to learn is. No under paths, no many upper floors, no confusing flanking roots that only pros can use, etc. It just exactly follows his father’s steps, fy_iceworld. A loyal cute boy!
💡 Note: We should NOT forget that game mechanics are effective on this case too. Imagine you could blow up walls and surprise enemies like in R6 siege. It would be amazing but make the gameplay a bit hard to understand in COD.
💠 3- Medium-Scale Size
Expanding the layout is one of those killing risks I mentioned earlier. Many recent COD maps unfortunately have this critical issue but The designers of Shoot House perfectly pass this test. They knew which parts had the potential of expanding and which parts did not. They probably learned the mistakes of previous maps and tested it a lot too. (playtest is inseparable and vital thing in design process)
For example, adding the second floor with its own limitations on the west side or make the alternative paths wider with different gameplay on north and south sides alongside the center zone.
💠 4- Supporting Different Playstyles
If a player wanna play with a melee weapon like a knife (very close range) or with normal guns like Uzi (short range) or Aug (medium range) or AWS (long range) they must have their own places to play.
Let’s imagine simulating one of them: I have a shotgun and can only able to shoot close targets, right?. If each part of the map has long paths with no hard covers how can I rush into the enemy zone without hitting or dying?! Answer is obvious: There’s no F**king chance!
Shoot House is remarkable at this. This map has different places for different playstyles like rusher, rummer and sniper (hell camper too!). If you check out YouTube videos you can see different types of weapon players and streamers use. (Here are some extreme examples: video 1 with snipe, video 2 with knife)
💠 5- Fast TTK
TTK stands for «Time to Kill» which in the gaming community means «how fast a player can get a first kill». Is it under 7 seconds or longer than 1 minute? Players will be more satisfied when they get first kill faster than other maps and that’s the key for first engagement.
However, Gunfight 2v2 mode is especially for this case but we are talking about a medium-scale map that’s not included in that mode. Keeping the TTK short in that size might be easy in words but so damn hard on paper! The scenario or layout itself may break for creating a sight for getting a fast kill and NOT every designer like that!
Imagine if in de_dust2, there was no sight on the middle door which CTs pass behind of it. NO WAY! Don’t take that hype from snipers!
Shoot House has several ways and methods to get a fast first kill in many directions. The famous one is this sight: (west and east spawn area to each other when round starts)
Alright, That’s all I had for this map! ⚡️
I know it has some critical problems right now, like respawning in front of enemies because of too many players, or camping opportunities in some areas etc. but in overall, the functionality of this map is pretty satisfying and gives a good score from the community. That’s why I chose it in the first place.
I think we will see remaster of this map for next version of CODs (maybe in MW2 2022, who knows?! )
💡 FYI: I recreated this map entirely in UE4 here for learning and analyzing every details on it. Check it out too 👍🏼
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Thank you for coming along and reading this write-up ❤️
Feel free to comment here if you have any feedback on this. Cheers!
🔗 My contacts: Gmail — Twitter — Artstation
