Xander Clauss
MMOFPS & Open World Level Design
Quartz Ridge Camp
Quartz Ridge and Indar Excavation, and the area between them, were interesting to watch throughout development. Both bases, and the empty half kilometer of desert between them, produced many multi-hour slugfests as the imaginary front line tugged back and forth. While the battlefield's dynamics changed as we learned to control it better (the midpoint building and coral smokers next to it, for instance), it still continued to create fun fights and amazing spectacles. There's this magical, cinematic feeling sprinting across a battlefield and taking cover with fifty other soldiers, and this area helped us develop similar experiences in negative spaces gamewide.
Quartz Ridge Camp
Quartz Ridge passed through a few hands since launch in several different iterations. Starting out as a roadside storage facility in beta to a secured gate at launch, the current iteration is more of a hillside fortress. I wanted to reduce the defensibility of it by removing the restrictive secured gate that went across the whole valley and allowed attackers through a very limited number of entrances. With a road leading around the entirety of Quartz Ridge's protective outer wall, attackers can put pressure on the other side if one is too heavily guarded.
The base itself is multi-terraced due to the 20~ degree grade that Quartz Ridge is on. The steep slope alone made it one of the more difficult bases to plan and implement, but gave it a unique feel and limited the height advantage the high side had as a hill.
Indar Excavation Site
A living fossil (I'm sorry) in regards to Planetside 2's many Indar revamps, Indar Excavation Site has changed little since launch, much like any of the simple tower-and-ring type bases on the continent. Vehicles are allowed to drive inside the base, but their effectiveness and mobility are severely limited, making the interior ring a primarily infantry-based fight. The sparse cover outside the dig site, however, puts vehicles much higher up on the food chain.
