After I had made my previous video, but before I could release it, over on the workshop,
Henge released the dream remake of Aztec, using Ancient’s assets. It’s brilliant
and I’ve hosted it on some servers for you to play on- links in the video’s description.
This remake is exactly what you’d hope for from a remade Aztec- it’s not a lazy retexturing
of the old map. It’s been done properly, using the new assets to re-envision HOW Aztec
would be done were it made today. I was amazed that it had been done to this level of quality,
so soon after the map Ancient had been released. So I reached out its maker, Henge, to ask
him a few questions about it. He has 2,700 hours in CS:GO, but over 11,000
hours in the map editor for it, with 200 hours invested in the last 2 weeks alone. That’s
dedication. Aztec isn’t the first map he’s remade- he’s remade several maps with nuke’s
style, like Nirage, Noffice and Nache. And he’s remade Mirage and Dust1 in Dust2’s
newer style. As well as this he has also ported a few of the older maps to the game. I particularly
like that he ported PORT, and has updated it to try and improve its balance.
So he’s no stranger to remaking maps, though having just studied how difficult a remake
would be I am particularly impressed with this latest Aztec remake, especially given
how numerous and complex the assets for Ancient are to work with. He told me that when he
first started remaking maps it took him about 300-350 hours to finish one, but now that
he’s familiar with the Source SDK he’s got a lot faster, saying he’s got the time
down to below 250 hours. He first got into Counter Strike in late 2014,
and started mapping for it soon after. He says this made sense for him, given his gaming
history. He loved building his own houses and cities in titles like the Sims and SimCity,
and numerous Tycoon games. He loved using the in-game editor for these games to create
environments himself and to have control over the game in some way.
So these days, when he likes a game, he looks to see if there’s an editor for it, and
says that CS:GO was perfect for this thanks to the flexibility its editing tools provided
which not only allows him to create new maps with, but also offers the flexibility to fine-tune
and to improve upon existing ones until they’re just right.
For his map remakes, he chooses a room to work on, then works on getting the textures,
props and lighting right in that one particular area. He then focuses on connecting it to
the surrounding rooms properly via props and by correcting any issues which arise in this
process. He then repeats this over and over again for every ‘room’ of the map, and
says this approach to mapping is more varied than doing each stage on a map-wide basis,
all at once. He used to compile far more regularly to see
how it looked in-game, but these days he is more experienced and will get 95% of an area
right on the first compile. Once the map is done, it goes through 5-6 more compiles as
he fine-tunes details until he’s happy with them, and deems the map to be ‘finished’.
I asked him if he ever gets bored of the process, but he says no. There are some steps where
it is rather tedious, like in piecing together prop parts into a full structure. And he finds
clipping the map off after it’s finished rather dull also. But overall, he enjoys mapping
and says that’s why it’s one of his hobbies. I asked him what the most difficult bit of
remaking a map was, and he says it’s striking a balance between recreating a map, while
remaining faithful to its original design. Even this, he wouldn’t say is ‘hard’-
describing it more as ‘tricky’, since it’s ultimately down to his own choices,
but says that getting this right is the most crucial part of remaking a map.
Compared with making a new map from scratch, he says the only difference with remaking
one is that there’s a pre-defined layout that you must stick to- and thinks this makes
remaking a map easier than creating a new one since the theme, balance and gameplay
decisions have already been made by a previous mapper. He likes to walk about the old map
to get inspiration, and to serve as a ‘guideline’ for his remake.
Although he likes the idea of making his own map someday, he cannot 3D model, and says
that until he can, he doesn’t like the idea of making his own map with pre-existing assets
because it wouldn’t quite feel like a fully original map. He says that a new map having
its own unique assets is very important to him, as it helps separate it from existing
ones in look and feel. I asked him how happy he was with his remake,
and says he’s generally pleased with it, but with all his remakes says you sometimes
feel limited by the originals and are unable to fully remake it the way you want to whilst
remaining faithful to the map’s legacy. Imagine you want to remake a map in Inferno’s
style. This map has many interiors, but the props and textures are more suited towards
confined interiors, and do not work well when applied to big halls and open spaces. He likes
Nuke’s textures and props because they are extremely versatile and can be used in almost
any scenario. What surprised me though is that, despite
its versatility and the number of times he’s used the map, he considers Nuke to be one
of the most difficult themes to map for- even more difficult than Ancient’s model set!
He says this is because Nuke’s props are all individual parts which fit together like
a puzzle. He gave these images as examples of its complexity. Sure, you can construct
a bendy pipe, or metal scaffolding. But it takes a huge amount of time and effort to
find the suitable props and to place them appropriately together.
What bothers him the most is the inability to optimise maps like Valve can because he
struggles to ‘autocombine’ the models and props on the maps. He believes being able
to use this feature would improve performance by up to 50%, but he struggles to find a clear
enough guide on how to use the feature which is why his current remakes don’t use that
feature. Lastly, I asked him what changes he would
make to Aztec if he could. He would change the double doors between T spawn and B site,
because in their current state it is way too easy for CT’s to lock it down and to prevent
terrorists from using this approach to get to the site.
He would also like to open up the areas either end of the bridge, and maybe to widen the
bridge itself with additional cover in the form of crates and barrels so that it’s
not such a savage chokepoint for terrorists to have to traverse.
He did think about rebalancing the map but chose to keep it faithful to the original
so that fans of the map could enjoy it with a modern facelift. But if the community requests
it, he will consider re-balancing it in another release.
His advice to mappers out there is that tutorials are great for learning the basics or for if
you get stuck somewhere, but the best way to learn to map is to load up the SDK and
to create some maps. Once he had more experience, he started decompiling existing maps and said
that helped a lot to learn what creating an entire map required, and which tools were
needed.
So thank you to Henge for taking the time, not just to talk to me, but to remake the
entire map. Check it out on the servers in the description below.