New Gas City Interception node is a big step back.

[z1oom]

The old Gas City Interception was one of my favourite spots for relic cracking due to several factors:

- it was a simple map. You could help other people even when standing on your spot. It also meant it was quite easy to carry newbies and people who brought leveling gear were not an anchor.

- It was quite small. This might not seem like a good thing, however it meant you were nearly always within affinity range with everyone, even without vazarin. It also meant that it was easy to react to enemy hack attempts and revive downed friendlies.

Now in contrast to this, new one is

-Looking much better. Though we basically went from "no lightning" to "hollywood overblow effects". The whole of new Gas City is amazing looks wise.

-Much bigger. Sure it leaves alot of room for actual level geometry, but after a few rounds I found myself unable to react to enemy hacks at all since i had to go across the map, dodging giant walls in the way and also climb vertically. You can also forget about sharing any affinity with anyone else unless you want to be a parasite.

-Its choke full of things. Sure, it makes it look really nice design wise, but it more things that get in the way

-The new lightning effects make enemies blend in extremely well. This is a problem if youre trying to notice where that one moa hacking the console is

But the absolute worst sin of all is:

- The tower location and design. Its, frankly, just horrid. It's basically the corpus/infested ship interception tower C, TIMES FOUR. All the spots are crammed into corners of the map, far away from one another, with levels and walls and crates and whatnot all blocking sight and way between them. The consoles themselves too, are awfully placed. For one, some of them seem to outside of the actual tower capture range (why?) and are also placed in a way that even while standing on a point, you need to be in an extremely specific spot to be able to see both at the same time. This is, due to the nature of Warframe, exteremely annoying as it rewards camping in designated spots. Because of how the interception AI works ( they tend to mindlessly drone to a single point, rarely splitting up) this design leads to a common situation where one isolated tenno has to hold off the whole map worth of spawns, while the others just sit and twiddle their thumbs. Can't help, will not pickup the new resource which everyone needs like 2k of. Usually this means that the Tower gets lost, people try and recap, enemies sprint to other towers and they capture them before you can think of coming back.

I just played a couple of rounds with 3 ~11 MR tenno. every round the corpus got to at least 60% and it was some of the most unfun in a basic mission Ive had with warframe in years. The worst part was that since my allies obviously didnt have top tier gear, it generated that awful feeling of them being an anchor and a detriment to your own fun. This feeling was absent from the previous iteration of this node. Please reconsider both the distance between nodes and the console placements. Brind them closer and put them more in the open

As it is now the node scores a solid A- for good Aesthetics, but also a GG for Garbage Gameplay.

 

Addendum: Since the new Gas City tiles are alot more vertical than usual, please also finally reconsider the static vertical range of radar mods. It really is a pain to find Hexanon.

[Krowiplacek]

The old one was one of my favorite interception/defense maps, it's really disappointing 😞

[Kontrollo]

The old one was a neat map, but I like the new one, too.

[(PSN)deathwolfclaw666]

I was wondering if they had butchered that map. I used to like the Ceres defense map until they made it look like one of my Halo map redesigns (abominations), now I try to avoid the map as best I can.

Thankfully playing on console now means I can enjoy it a little longer.

[Beautiful]

Not only that, the new index is bigger and its harder to kill the enemies

[Variks_Prime]

I agree. There is a marked tendency to overdesign new Defense/Interception tiles (while often leaving syndicate medallions out, too, though haven't seen if this one does) that is frankly making them largely unplayable. I'll be avoiding Io and Callisto as long as this behemoth is there - the old tile was much better for actual gameplay and attractiveness. The current Corpus Ship tile for these game modes is superior to the new Gas City one for playability yet inferior to the OLD Gas City one, and an Invasion-captured Grineer Galleon tile of course beats all of the above.

 

The new "trap" on this tile really does not feel well-thought out, either - potentially problematic just like the Void one.

 

Overall, to get this tile playable in Defense and Interception DE would need to shrink it way back down. It feels like a 32+ man Unreal Tournament FFA or Team FFA map, not something designed for a 4 man coop defense game type. Pit 2 teams of 8-16 human players each against each other on this, and you've got some action, but it's just too much space and too much occlusion for the Defense and Interception gametypes. That said, keeping it as a tile for the random-gen'd game modes (Exterminate, etc.) might be viable. It just doesn't belong in Defense or Interception, and it's going to massively harm Jupiter's popularity in those modes as-is, despite Io formerly being a popular node. I fully expect to see a MASSIVE drop in squads on Io compared to before this expansion released. Callisto, I think, was never all that popular to begin with?

Edited May 25, 2019 by Variks_Prime