Part 16: Metro w/Gatz and Vicissitude(Spelling?)

Metro w/Gatz and Vicissitude

Nothing quite draws the ire of BF3 and BF4 players like the words "Metro 24/7" but it is almost guaranteed to be something that they see or experience once in their lives. I mean, it's a great map for unlocking stuff, but it is in no way meant to be fun or interesting in any regard. In BF3 I would term long Metro games where we either won by a large margin or got crushed as "anti-fun." I will never understand how people can buy a game that is all about playing in a really large environment with vehicles and huge numbers of players and decide that instead they would like to spend literal thousands of hours inside a glorified hallway aiming down sights waiting for someone to come down their "lane" or pushing into the other team's spawn and winning through ticket bleed and sniper rounds. Luckily I don't want to gouge out my own eyeballs while commenting on this one thanks to Gatz and Vicissitude joining me.



The red marks the ways into and out of the Metro top level, where the B flag is located. The team on the RU side has a pretty easy path to the point, it's basically all flat and they can lock down some pretty good choke points at the various stairs and such the US team has to take to get on that level. This is part of why the RU often ends up winning the rounds on this map if they take B and hold it during the initial onslaught. If the US takes B first thing they may be able to set up a defense behind it and in the Jerry Sandusky Memorial Locker Room off to the side, but will ultimately have a harder time holding the point. This isn't to say either team has a major advantage; good or bad players and teamwork make a huge difference, but yeah, taking B and holding it for a time is basically going to win you the game. My team fought somewhat valiantly, but a team completely dug in around a point is difficult to dislodge when it is 32 on 32.

On the Xbox in BF3 this map was little different from what you see here, though on the console with the lower player count (as in, fewer players in the game total than on one team in the PC version) it was possible for a random guy to sneak around and get to a point and flip the game around, hell on the goon server for the Xbox 360 we would often switch teams three to four times in a 1000 ticket Metro round and just break a spawn lock, turn it into a spawn lock on the other team and then flip all the players to the opposite team again and repeat. A larger playercount gives a lot fewer chances of doing just that. How many times did I run into a group of more than three people in the video? How few times did people on my team get around the other team? I hear people say when the map is 16 on 16 it is actually pretty fun, but anything above 24 on 24 begins to get brutal to anti-fun territory.

Here's the thing about this map though, and I mention it in the video: Despite being unlike almost any other map in BF3 and being a complete meat grinder of a time, it was still the most popular map BY FAR in that game. The Second Assault expansion advertised itself as updating 4 of the most played maps in BF3. This map and Gulf of Oman were great for camping spawns due to the unbalanced nature of Oman and the absolute horror show that Metro is. Caspian Border and Operation Firestorm were popular large vehicle maps in BF3 and, to their credit, were widely played on almost every server. But even then: Metro was in every server rotation and had a huge number of servers dedicated to just the one map.

DICE, during the design phase of the map (Which, by the way, were actually converted from BF3 to BF4 by DICE LA, formerly Danger Close, who made the new Medal of Honor games) for BF4 touted new routes to make it possible for people to flank and avoid being completely stomped. I show off the one door they added from the outside which puts you pretty close to the B flag, and I looked into the service access door that brings you up from down below, but outside of those two things and the Levolution (which I wandered through) the map is nearly exactly the same as Metro in BF3 at release. I say "At release" because a series of patches were issued in BF3 to end some bugs and glitches people were exploiting to get above and below the map. You could still do all these when the map pack came out not only on the Xbox One, which got it months earlier than the other platforms, but even on the PS4, Xbox 360 and PC. How they failed to fix that I'll never know. All I can say is