Features · persistent
The Sprawl
A place rather than a match. You deploy into a city with a sidearm and eight rounds, find what you can, and then have to get out — through the one way out that is open, which everybody on the map has been told about.
Both cities, right now
Asking the server…
It used to be a match, and that was the problem
This began as a match that was simply always running. It sat in the lobby next to Slayer and Capture the Flag, it never ended, and joining it looked exactly like joining a match of anything else. That was wrong in the way that matters most: it told the player this was the same kind of thing as a match, and then behaved nothing like one. No clock, no score, no winner, and nothing you did in it had any consequence past the moment you did it. It was a match-shaped hole.
The loop, which is the whole design
- Deploy, from the lobby rather than from the match list, because it is not a match. You go in with a sidearm and eight rounds and nothing else.
- Find things. Chests hum, audible from about thirty-five metres. Finding loot is walking and listening rather than reading a map. The pulse is the map.
- Get out. One way out is open at a time, for ninety seconds, and everybody on the map is told which and can hear it calling. Standing in it for ten seconds takes you out.
- Keep what you carried out. Everything you extract with goes into a stash on your account and is still there tomorrow. Everything you were carrying when you died is gone.
That last pair is the point, and it is the one thing a match cannot do: it makes a decision out of “one more chest”. A match resets and this does not. The moment somebody has something worth keeping, the whole map changes character for them, and the extraction everybody can hear becomes a place people go to wait.
Why the way out is announced
A secret exit is not a decision, it is a formality. Telling everybody where the door is, and when, is what turns leaving into the most dangerous thing you do — and in a game played by ear, a fight with a known place and a known time is the only kind anybody can plan.
The call is what makes it work by ear: loud, carrying the whole map, and the same sound every time, so after one session everybody knows what an open extraction sounds like from four streets away.
Opening a chest is an announcement
Opening one is loud and slow — three seconds, carrying about sixty metres, which is further than the hum that led you there. Every chest you open tells the map where you are, and whether to open it now or come back is a real decision made entirely on what you can hear.
A looted chest goes quiet and comes back in a few minutes. A quiet patch of map is a patch somebody has already been through, which is information about where people are that costs nothing to collect.
Supply drops land every few minutes, audible from the whole map, holding a power weapon: a fight with a time and a place attached, which is what a persistent map with nothing scheduled in it otherwise lacks.
Three weapon slots rather than Halo's two, because a mode built on finding things needs somewhere to put what you find.
Two cities, both running, and you pick one
There are two Sprawls and they are not two settings of the same place.
New Mombasa
Four streets and twelve buildings, with a service tunnel under each road and a waterfront at one end. Everybody on it is within earshot of everybody else. A run there is twenty minutes of being hunted in a space the size of a car park. Opening a cache is heard by half the map. Getting to the way out is two streets and a decision.
Persist
Fifteen hundred metres of the Yangtze delta: a river with seven bridges, four metro lines underneath, a hundred named streets, an airport, and farmland with villages in it. A run there is a walk. You can go ten minutes without hearing a person, the way out is a journey rather than a sprint, and the thing that gets you killed is the last two hundred metres.
Those are different games and the difference is not difficulty. Picking one for somebody would have been picking what sort of evening they were going to have, and rotating them would have been worse: it would have meant that whether your next run was a knife fight or a hike was decided by the clock.
So both run, permanently, at the same time, and deploying is choosing which. Neither costs anything when it is empty — a Sprawl with nobody in it does its extraction clock and its cache refills and no more, because the only expensive thing in the mode is the cache hum and that is worked out per player, of which there are none.
The stash is on the account rather than on the city. What you carry out of one you can carry into the other, and that is the whole reason it is a stash and not a locker: the point of banking something is that it is yours afterwards, everywhere. A stash that only opened in the city you filled it in would quietly be two games rather than one.
Half of what you find should be about leaving
There are forty-four things to find, and half of them are about getting out rather than about fighting.
| Kit | What it does |
|---|---|
| An acoustic decoy | Walks away making your footsteps. |
| A radar jammer | Fills every tracker nearby with contacts that are not there. |
| A transponder | Says where the next way out will be before it opens — the most valuable sentence in the mode, which is why it is rare. |
| Muffled boots | Halve how far your own footsteps carry. |
The transponder cannot see a future it has not got: the next exit is chosen at the moment it opens, so between one closing and the next opening there is genuinely nothing to say except how long. That is honest, and it is still worth knowing.
What is deliberately gone
Scores, and the bounty. The bounty existed to stop one player quietly owning a permanent scoreboard; there is no scoreboard now. What stops somebody owning the map is that banking anything means walking to a place everybody can hear.