- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PST
Hey there, peoples. This is the “detail guy” (Are we really going with that?), here. Well, as Seranal already said, this is not the perfect rendition we had hoped it would be. But it’s not so deeply made as to be un-tweakable. Also, this is not made as a knock against Guardian. Far from it, Guardian was a good map, (got my Kill Frenzy achievement there) but we just think Lockout was that beautiful a map. You do spawn with an assault rifle, but that can be fixed in your game variant or even in quick options. (For a true Halo 2 revisitation, stick SMG’s in your hands at spawn. Heh.)
Moving on to the details of each variant: (All locations will be given by reference to original Halo 2 map.)
Assault: Set up as a one-bomb attack/defense game with the bomb starting on the tall tower farthest from sniper-spawn. The arm/plant location is in the corner beneath and to the side of the lift tower. Limited attack/defense spawn designations. Aside from the mandatory start points it’s mostly neutral spawns (might stand for some work there).
CTF: Set up as two-flag with each flag in the positions mentioned above (tower & corner). (On a side-note, that’s where almost all the objectives will be, excepting only the ball for Oddball. More on that later.)
King/Hill (where things get a little hairy): Set up for crazy king, but we set up the map’s objects before we played with the variants, so there’s a hill somewhere under all the boxes that has no spawn order designation. (We tried but we couldn’t find it, and we weren’t about to dig up the whole map looking for it. This is also true of an escort point in VIP, a goal in Juggernaut, and a Territory.) Hopefully the lack of spawn order will keep it from becoming a part of the game. Otherwise, we know it’s on the ground somewhere. Good hunting.
Juggernaut/VIP/Territories/Infection: Aside from removing all the goal points we could and erasing the starting points from what would have been empty air on the real Lockout, not much touched here. We figured they weren’t important in the grand scheme (considering three of the four are generally team-based kill games) and anyone who wanted to play the game-types would set their own. (Yeah, we got lazy and wanted to play our map. So sue us.)
This is still a largely honor-based map, but we think it keeps the overall spirit of Lockout alive. Keep in mind the distance from the lift tower to its opposite side (sword-hole) feels a little squished and the upper level of the sword-hall isn’t as wide as the original, but we love it. We hope that you will come to love it with us.
Eventually we’ll hear from Tolerant Taurus, who will hopefully be able to discuss some of the ideas they (he and Seranal) had in the way they chose to arrange the map. I wasn’t around for that part. I came in just in time to help with weapon-placement, and game variants.
Finally, massive thanks to Bungie for giving us the tools to do this, a game entertaining enough to hold our attention for the time it took to do this, and of course for the original Lockout map that inspired it.