Check Out This Ramp!

Level Designer Ian Cuslidge waxes poetic about the importance of one seemingly-insignificant ramp.

When working on multiplayer games, designers often end up focusing on the spectrum of casual and competitive player bases. On the one hand, most games want to be approachable and immediately intuitive, to ensure that the barrier to entry is low and the majority of players who see or hear about the game feel as though they could jump right in. On the other hand, a game’s long-term health, and its ability to persist in the face of newer games or changing player interests, are dependent on depth. Giving players a high skill ceiling — something to strive for every time they play — can help them stick around.

How might we go about balancing these two sides when designing levels? In this post, I’m going to focus on one very specific example from a level I made for Team Fortress 2, to demonstrate how both casual and competitive audiences can get different meaningful interactions from the same piece of level geometry.

If the ramp weren’t there, a player standing at either spot in the above top-down image could land a sniper headshot from the other side of the combat space, each from a position of relative safety. Additionally, a sniper standing near the left spot would be able to see roughly a third of the middle control point area, which is a huge amount of real estate to cover from so far back. This would make it extremely dangerous to push the point, resulting in more frequent stalemates.

By placing the ramp in the choke, the enemy team has an opportunity to cover their push until just before they enter the choke, giving the sniper a smaller window to line up a shot. This is true for non-sniper play as well: a team waiting on one side of the choke won’t know an enemy team is about to push until the moment the team crests the ramp, thus forcing the defending team to react quite quickly.

By virtue of the ramp being slightly elevated, it also gives pushing players an incentive to attack. In a game like TF2, being up high is very often advantageous. When a Soldier fires rockets down onto targets, the rocket can hit the ground, causing opponents to take splash damage from the explosion (a Soldier firing up at a target must hit directly to inflict damage). By putting a ramp inside the choke, the team that pushes into the choke will “automatically” gain temporary height advantage over their opponents!

For casual audiences, this kind of focused geometry helps to invisibly manage player movement through the map. Players in the second control point will naturally flow to the choke to secure height advantage, take cover from sniper fire, and get away from enemies in the middle. Afterwards, they will continue to push in and secure the middle point. Even if they don’t recognize the reason for their push, the ramp is there incentivizing them. This kind of subtle player direction is key to ensuring a map flows well, and is especially necessary when players are unsure of themselves or lack the hardcore competitive mindset.

A rollout is a particular route that a player can take to get to the middle as quickly as possible. Some rollouts are easier (a medic just runs to the middle), while some require a significant number of rocket/sticky jumps, health pickups, overheals from the medic, double jumps, and more to ensure that you arrive at the middle both quickly and with the right amount of health/ammo. Rollouts can be difficult, requiring significant practice to properly execute them. Even then, skilled players can make mistakes, forcing their team to improvise mid-rollout.

For a die-hard competitive gamer, this ramp plays a jaw-droppingly important role. Usually, it serve as a basic sightline blocker / height advantage opportunity, but when a Roaming Soldier goes big and nails their rocket jumps, this ramp (in combination with a “ground pogo”) can launch the player across the entire middle control point, giving them control of the opposing team’s health pack and cutting off the flanking route that an enemy Scout might be taking. While airborne, the Soldier even has time to reload several rockets and check the choke for the enemy team.

That doesn’t mean this maneuver is overpowered, though: after three consecutive rocket jumps, a Roaming Soldier is fairly low on health. If they miss the health pack, or if an opposing Demoman has sticky-bombed the health pack from the chokepoint, the Soldier will be deep in enemy territory, putting themself in danger and their team at a dangerous disadvantage. It’s also possible to make a mistake, even for a practiced player, with such a technically-demanding rollout. Messing up your third jump means you’ll be low on health and slow to reach the middle point, throwing your team’s strategy out the window. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, even the coolest trick becomes predictable. A Roaming Soldier using a fast rollout every round will quickly find themselves fighting the enemy team one-on-three.

Having looked at both competitive and casual angles on the matter, here are some things we’ve learned from this particular ramp.

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