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Wow, this is so cool!
If you were the designer of Iwo Jima I just wanna say that breakthrough on that map is the kind of legendary battlefield experience that I'll clearly remember a decade from now.
This map feels like a true journey. The unique sectors from the beach landing to the caves and up the mountain create a strong narrative element to the battle that is missing from most maps. Personally I think it might be the best bf map since Bad Company 2.
Absolutely amazing, inspired level design work. Please make lots of maps for the next game :)
I was! Thank you so much, this means the world to me. It was definitely the main goal, to create a sense of journey from the beaches to the summit, so i'm super happy you feel we hit the mark :D
Would you mind sharing some of the thoughts that went into the map both design wise, and gameplay wise. Im genuinely curious how the maps are made for this game, and how the designers make the maps have a good game flow and be balanced for the two teams.
I absolutely love the conquest on this map, and breakthrough is second to none. It feels like a vicious battle to break through the beachhead, and to claw your way across the island until you reach the mountain, which is a very intense fight up the mountain, but the feeling when you finally reach the top and hoist the flag is the best feeling in the game.
Thank you so much!
Sure thing :)
When we knew we were making the pacific, we started to come up with ideas to pitch to the leadership. It was actually the two level artists in the pod who came up with the initial idea to do Iwo Jima, and I was very intrigued by their idea of making it closer in scale to the real thing. Together with a 3D artist we started on the pitch where I then tried to make sense of how we would build the map in that scale and still be fun. Key things I focused on trying to figure out was the beachlanding and the tunnels (+ summit).
I always saw the beachlanding sector and the summit sector almost as intro and outro sectors. The beachlanding is a strong fantasy, perfect way to set the mood for both attackers and defenders. The reason we made it very attacker favored was because I thought it would be very frustrating after a couple of deaths, where as defenders retreating to stronger positions felt better. Also since there are 6 sectors we kinda had to try and balance it as much as we could.
For the summit we kinda threw all rules out the window (into the volcano?) since we knew it would just be total mayhem anyway. One of my proudest dev moments is actually the first playtest we had with everyone on the team, which turned out to be a close game that the attackers barely won, taking the summit with artillery and chaos barraging the summit. I know it was a lot of V1 clips of the summit after the launch but I loved every single one. Also a fun note is that in the beginning we built it so vehicles wouldn’t make it up to the summit, but you guys would manage it either way so I figured that we should just make it easier from the beginning haha.
The tunnels were always meant to be a grind, but we made sure there were as many entrances as possible without losing too much of the directionality. I also did some stuff to help lead players, especially if you find yourself in a random tunnel. If you are going upwards you go to the artillery room, if you go downwards you end up in the assembly room. The inner tunnels have the strong wooden beams and the outer tunnels have wooden panels. Also we made sure the other rooms had something you can identify to help with navigation, like the tunnel that has the sleeping quarter for example.
Those were some general examples, ofc more work went into other snippets as well as all the other areas and gamemodes, but those were some of the key ones I remember fondly :)
Thanks! I was always interested in game development, especially map design, and it is awesome to be able to ask people about it who do it for a living, I really appreciate the response, and playing that for the first time in that playtest must have been an absolute rush. The suribachi sector is super fun and I remember when I first played on that part of the map, It was so chaotic and fun, with everyone pushing up the mountain inch by inch, and when we got to the top, everyone was dancing while the flag went up!
Also, are the cannons in the tunnel purely decorative or were they supposed to hit the beach?
A little bit of both, they can shoot towards the american boat HQ in conquest, and in breakthrough no, since its in a much later sector. One can shoot at the crashed plane though :D
On breakthrough, a possible way to get around that could be to extend the range on those specific cannons, and allow people to deploy on those cannons, and redeploy without counting as a death, just like the dreadnaught in BF1, but thats just food for thought I guess
Not a bad idea, but ultimately we didn’t want to introduce map/mode specific rules, which is why we built spaces for them in sector 1 and 2 :)