Multiplayer level study: DoD & TF2

Here comes an old study I did a year ago at the university. It was labeled “is level design measurable?” . What I basically did was to compare Day of Defeat and Team Fortress 2’s level design to see if you could come up with any difference simply by measuring things such as covers, time from spawn to control points, number of entrances to the objective areas and such.

>> Have a look at the full report here! (in swedish)

The result of the actual report wasn’t that interesting since there is one obvious difference between Day of Defeat: Source and Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress 2 has mirrored levels, DoD has not!

Despite of this I found some other really juicy facts just by looking at the data I gathered:

Team Fortress 2

First off I happened to stumple upon the fact that travel distance between spawn points to capture areas are very very similar for the three levels I looked at: cp_well, cp_granary and cp_badlands. Its about 10 seconds between each capture point.

It’s actually so similar that if I put overviews of cp_well and cp_granary on top of each other the capture points are almost exactly at the same coordinates!

I do not think this is a coincidence, nor do I think its laziness. I think Valve did this to establish a certain feel to the levels in Team Fortress 2. They probably did lots of prototyping, came up with this 10 second rule as something that worked very well with the core gameplay of TF2 and went with that. Very clever!

Inspired by this we actually did the same thing when developing Decadence. All of our arenas have about 12 seconds travel time from spawn to the Water Node to establish a unique feel to Decadence.

Day of Defeat: Source

When looking at Day of Defeat: Source I found that you could look at travel time from spawn to the capture points for each team, chokepoints in favor for each team, entrances to capture points and put cover positions into the mix you could actually calculate pretty accurately which team has an advantage on the map. I compared this data with official stats Valve made official at their website to confirm this.

Let’s have a look at Dod_avalanche as an example, which is favored for the Axis team by about 60% of total wins. Looking at the overview axis has more advantageous points than the allies on their half of the level. Axis also has two chokepoints to their favor compared to the Allies which only has one. Axis also has more angles to attack the middle flag than the Allies. If you add the total travel time from spawn to all flags Axis wins with about 17 seconds less total travel time.