A Reintroduction to My Map Design Criteria

Hey guys! The last time I wrote on this blog was January. Isn't it crazy how fast time flies? Anyway, I figure that before I go into the Map Design Reviews for Binding Blade I'd make my Map Design Criteria known in case anyone forgot. I'm basically going to copy / paste the blog post I wrote about this 3 years ago:


Map Rating Criteria

1. Multiple Approaches: Are there 2 or more routes the player can take toward reaching a boss? Are they meaningful? Is one route significantly better than the other ones presented?

2. Turtle Disincentives: How does the map punish turtling? If you don’t know what the definition of turtling is here’s the Wikipedia article. Some maps will instead hand the player a reward for going faster instead, like giving them more money or a gaiden chapter. This counts for fulfilling this requirement.

3. Side Objectives: NPCs, villages to rescue, etc. This isn’t something that a chapter has to have but it does count as brownie points when certain maps do this well.

                         Another thing I’ll be looking for will be things like super easy ways to trivialize a map. Examples of this will be like having a paired up wyvern fly in a straight line and thus beat a map in a few turns. (Conquest says hi)

Warp skipping doesn’t count because warp can trivialize almost any map. Being trivialized by an infinite range warp staff says less about the map and more about the warp.

I should also point out that some maps don’t necessarily have to have all these things. Exceptions to these rules exist, but I’ll make sure to explain why whenever that map comes around. The first maps of the game will generally be rated more leniently because none of them fulfill important requirements. Instead, they have a different criteria that I’m looking for.

  Here is the rating system I’ve come up with:

• Excellent: The highest map rating. Goes toward maps that do the positive things well. This is for the best designed maps in the game.

(Note to the Reader: The highest ranking used to be called "Pass". Somebody pointed out that this was too underwhelming for a top tier map rating. I agree with that statement so I changed the name to "Excellent" instead of "Pass". I also went back and retroactively changed all the maps with the "Pass" rating to "Excellent" now.)

• Pretty Good: A great map that has a couple of things that prevent it from getting the rank of "Excellent". The second highest map design rating.

• Decent: This rating is for maps that have more positives than negatives, but have more noticeable negatives.

• Meh: A mediocre map. Not terrible per se, but also not great either. The first of the negative map design rankings.

• Below Average: A bad map with a couple of redeeming qualities that prevent from being utter crap.

• Fail: The lowest map rating. This is reserved for maps that either don’t do anything well or are really easy to undermine.

          At the end of a game’s map rating I count up every single map that gets a “Decent” rating or higher (Pretty Good and Excellent) and then divide that by the number of total maps in the game. That becomes the game’s rating on how good their maps are. I should also point out that if a game has multiple routes (like Thracia 776 or Binding Blade for example) then all maps from all route will be taken into account. I hope you enjoy the map ratings."

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Feel free to make comments on if you think something here needs to change. I should be out with the map design review for the beginning chapters of Binding Blade Hard Mode soon. :)