Anyone else disappointed with San Francisco's map design?

[EdgeTW]

After some fairly uninspiring map designs in the areas before San Francisco, I must say that the area south of the Golden Gate Bridge turned out to be an even larger disappointment. I was hoping to see some serious three dimensional map design in the city.. densely packed ruins of large buildings, open facings where the various floors of structures were exposed like a cutaway view of ruined offices, combat across towering rooftops where our ridiculous jumping abilities could actually be put to some use.. something closer to the concepts in "I am Legend", expect mixed with strange alien flora instead of normal plant growth.

Instead, it's like the Defiance team went in exactly the opposite direction and used San Francisco as an opportunity to save some serious time on map creation. We have huge, wide open, bland spaces of mostly desolate hills, marked only with the occasional odd rock and the infrequent appearance of some residential ruin. Most of the buildings, ruins, and roads.. just gone. It's truly uninspiring and boring, and I'm sad that this.. the one area where a large urban area could be justified, was completely wasted. 5 years of development and the maps we ended up with.. I just don't get it.

[Gero]

I can say, I did rush to get there assuming it would be a pretty in depth and creative zone..and now I find myself avoiding the area mostly because it's just outright boring. I also expected some sort of larger town there only to find 6 people sitting under a broken down overpass to be the biggest gathering.... I can say I was pretty disappointed myself.

[twistedcritts]

disappointed also.

[NakedApe]

I also got the "hurry up and get it done" sense. From the "oh man, a huge robot guarding the Golden Gate, this is going to be tough ... oh wait, cutscene" onward it seemed to be phoning it in. I also find Nim a complete snooze of a bad guy. Same old tropes, same bad anime type stuff. Very much a console feeling. I think a team assault on the Dark Matter HQ in the rubble of San Fran would have been much more interesting.

[Tayce]

Yeah, I was really looking forward to SF but when I got there it was pretty meh.
There's just way too few ruins, the feeling is there in certain areas (ex. downtown) but I was hoping atleast 50% of the map was like that.
Plus it's really gray and boring with far too much empty space.

That combined with "Dark Bulletsponge", sorry "Dark Matter" makes me avoid SF.

[hhkaal416]

I feel exactly de same, the most part of the time im on the north area, don't like san fran...

[Ninno20]

I actually agree, we need a big city abandoned city with tall buildings and streets, a area with depth we can fight. Maybe with random event missions like raid the bloc's, or storm the tower.

Will be amazing. Will add a variation.

[EdgeTW]

I want to also nip the "urban environments can't be done in an MMO" excuses in the bud before they start:

Urban in an MMO 1

Urban in an MMO 2

Urban in an MMO 3

Urban in an MMO 4

Urban in an MMO 5

Urban in an MMO 6

You get the idea.

[Dantronos223]

As much as I love this game I gotta agree, was super excited to get to the point where you go there and was expecting alot more ruins/urban areas, just feels like a big barren moon or something lol. downtown and the small ammount of other really tiny ruins are ok though.

[MAdMaN]

I too was disappointed. It looks awful, the waypoint system doesn't work properly there, frequently sending you up hills instead of around them, and it's painful to drive around with the ruined roads flinging you up into the air if you hit them at the wrong angle.