One thing I really appreciate about hunt showdown is how the environments feel like real places.
It's not just in the graphical fidelity or the layout, but in the fact that you can hop over the fences, that there are trees laid out in a real forest, that these buildings are arranged with reasonable sized doorways and windows.
The bayou feels like a lived in place, I don't get the impression that it was all white boxed and then art passed.
Valorant for example has these gorgeous colored maps but it's so incredibly clear that they started off as checkerboard boxes and then did a pass over them to make it pretty
Even big AAA games start to feel that way too
Like this environment is so stunningly beautiful and complex but only the exact right wooden things can be climbed on and pretty soon you'll realize that you're walking down the same gray box corridors that were then painted over to look like a jungle.
You have these lovingly rendered jungle vistas... but ultimately they're just hallways. You can't move freely through the jungle. A different art team could have made this a sci-fi space corridor or a ruined french village in the middle of world war II
The blue and gray represent the sole extent of the walkable terrain. It really is just a bunch of corridors.
And coming back to Hunt: Showdown you have these big open spaces that you can approach however you please
And yet, if you peel back the layers, there is actually good map design for a shooter game. The knee deep water creates choke points that naturally to points of interest. Look at that church bell tower that can be a sight line for snipers, there's plenty of cover in the tall grass and behind those trees to break line of sight. In the above screenshot you can see how sunken buildings create these natural sloping areas for the player to peak up and over for cover, or how collapsed buildings and trees give logical ramps up and down from the high ground. It still is a designed space for you to play a shooting game in, but it feels like a real place. The illusion is sold so well.
It's not just that it feels cool to be in a place that feels realistic, but when you're able to approach it like a real place it opens up so many more possibilities.
In a game like Call of duty you have all these harsh divisions between lanes, these calculated choke points, extra wide walkways, sharp vertical walls. You can't just come from another angle, or crouch in a bush, and because it's so streamlined for target acquisition there's no tension. If you can't see the enemies they're not there, because if they were there you'd see them.
And that's what makes the maps in Marathon so interesting
Because Marathon is in the same genre as Hunt, roughly, and it has very open maps... but they still feel like video game levels over real places. You have those sharp vertical squares, those harsh divisions between high and low ground
Interior places have very deliberately placed vents, and INCREDIBLY open spaces to enable plenty of maneuvering. Cover usually comes from something solid and roughly box shaped. I can see how this started as a series of checkered volumes, and then (incredibly talented and experienced) Artists came in to paint those boxes into a place.
I've seen people complaining about the number of maps Marathon has, and it's more than Hunt had for a very long time, and yet I never see anyone complain about Hunt's small map pool. Because Hunt's environments aren't so optimized, because they can be a little realistic, a little messy, because there's more freedom to move around without being funneled into choke points by massive giant walls, I wonder if that's what makes them "last longer".
Ultimately, neither philosophy is objectively better. I prefer Hunt and I wish more games worked that way, but there's a good reason why most of the industry went the way that it did. My thoughts about how we got there are fodder for a different blog post.
Ultimately, I just think Hunt Showdown is a really cool game and it deserves more praise and analysis from the broader game design crowd.
Like we're reaching the point where we're analyzing the very source code of Ocarina of Time and comparing and contrasting months apart builds of the Counterstrike beta from when the twin towers were still standing. Maybe it's time to take a closer look at some newer games.
This game rules I wish that the live action TV series for it didn't die in development hell
