de_havana

It's the first time I've had the pleasure of playing the map, but it seems that CTs have a very strong advantage at B, and T's can pinch from mid and A long very easily.

It was most likely the large number of people that skewed the balance but I think I was full white flashed about 6 times in a row as a T on B at it's worse, 3 times if i was lucky ( <- imagine that with a sad face, I needed me some!)

The detailed areas look beautiful! With the wooden trellis by the pink tiled area near CT spawn, will you plan to make that a prop with wood properties? right now nothing slows bullets down and it can kind of be a one way advantage with vision.

This looks awesome! I want to play this

I don't think reducing the timing on CT's getting to mid is ideal. With the current layout I think a major problem is the desirability to go B as Terrorist when mid is as biased as it is towards T side. Right now T's can take control of mid, and thus have a strong advantage in where they want to rotate.

jizz

I think the big black triangle in the middle needs to be low enough to allow both sides to throw nades across.

It would definitely allow for more planned takes and could slow down the pace (rushing mid is not as effective anymore)

Quote from Lajron

Also some visual work

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Man I love the aesthetics on this map, the finished architecture looks fantastic, very cool style! Great to see it progressing.

Having T's go up a ladder like that seems kind of OP for ct's to defend from the corner now, especially since you can't shoot properly while on a ladder, and if you fling up the ladder you're basically playing duck hunt.

Do you use instancing while mapping? Or cordons for the screenshots?

Architecture looking so tasty I could lick it...

It looks good but the textures are a little noisey for my taste. Maybe you can post some of your 2D flats, so that people can offer some critique?

Despite the map looking really cool, my two big criticisms are that the textures don't really work well together and look smooth (like DE_MIRAGE, does, for instance) and also that the surfaces in the level feel very "brushy" and low polygon (I actually thought the map was almost entirely brushes at first). Additionally, things like arches should always have external trims (these should probably be models as well). It's a promising start and I definitely encourage you to keep going, but I think the map needs a pass to really solve these issues in a comprehensive way.

Compare the amount of visual noise in your photographs to your ingame textures, that's one of the big sources of my complaints I guess. It's all rather simple colors, not much surface detail, unlike your in-game, and that hurts the visuals IMO. Having so much surface detail on the textures also draws a lot of attention to the low poly arches, etc because of the tiling of the noise.

Even those textures look noisey. For now, I would work with completely solid colors, and then add very subtle noise to them later on. The reason I say that is that less is really more, because CS:GO's lighting engine is very beautiful with minimalist styles, and also because players will very much appreciate the solidity of the surfaces. Adding more noise is easy, working with a reduced level of noise is difficult and will ultimately produce a more pleasing end result (TF2 kind of look, but more realistic). If you really reduce the amount of noise on textures you will see how you will need to be more careful about which details you do use, because they will become very strong and important, and more impressive visually.

This may sound like a crazy suggestion, but in my experience this is the better art style for CS:GO, and I already think it would improve your work a lot on this map. Mirage is a good example of how to use solid color effectively, Season also does it but it won't be as helpful to you since it's scientific/futuristic.

tl;dr: as long as you get the correct color tone, it's very easy to add almost transparent levels of dirt and detail for realism. So just use solid colors for now.

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yes you will need to go back and re-imagine some of your buildings, but you will be doing so in order to pursue a more effective + visually pleasing style.

Dont know if you saw my message in the playtest but don't worry about the speed of the door opening.

Valve decided to tie it to tickrate for some reason. same issue exists on 128t nuke etc.