Cargo

Competitive, Fast Paced, Close Quarters

Description -

Cargo is POLYGON's take on a small 5v5 map made for competitive gameplay, playable on the King of the Hill game mode.

Design Goals -

During the development of Cargo, I had a few design goals in mind for what I wanted gameplay to feel like. The 3 most important design goals were Competitive Viability, Fast Paced combat, and an abundance of Verticality. 

The map needed to be Competitive. This was the first attempt at making a small scale, 5v5 map in POLYGON. Our players who were wanting an avenue to play the game in a more serious environment needed the map to be balanced and spawn camping needed to be kept to a minimum.

Cargo is a very small map, this combined with POLYGON's quick movement paired nicely, bringing a new meaning to Fast Paced.  The most viable strategy for playing Cargo is to never stop moving. Constantly looking for flanks around the small side lanes, moving from cover to cover to avoid grenades and peeks, Cargo requires the player to be fast.

Lastly, I aimed to bring a new style of gameplay through verticality. Players enjoy parkour in POLYGON, and the maps before Cargo did not have all that much verticality. This opened a great opportunity to add a new look into the movement of POLYGON, allowing players to climb on almost every object they can find.

Early Concepts -

The early iterations of Cargo proved to be too small. The map grew with each iteration, the final size ended up 30% wider and 12.5% longer than the first iteration.

Additionally, there were many small hiding spots in the first iteration of the map, these quickly got fixed by rotating and scaling the containers to discourage players from hiding in small corners.

First Iteration:

Second Iteration:

Playtesting Troubles - 

Throughout playtesting, we found and resolved a handful of design and gameplay issues with Cargo. Here are some of those problems:

• Spawn protection lasted too long (looking at you thatguyujustmet)
• Grenades were way too powerful on such a small map, these were toned down significantly
• While one of the goals was to still allow longer ranged weapons on the smaller map, I had created too many long sightlines that made it difficult to push the objective. These were quickly broken up with more cover, you can see this in the second iteration above
• The map was too small in early versions, the size of the ship was increased
• The balance of the map was improved with every iteration

Performance -

Cargo has performed exceptionally well as a map in POLYGON. The players who seek fast paced gameplay with smaller teams have a great avenue to experience that gameplay. In ranked play, Cargo has easily become the most popular map, being played in 60% of matches overall.

Gameplay Video - 

Enjoy some Ranked Gameplay from one of the best players in POLYGON, Azul

Play Cargo -

Download POLYGON and play Cargo for free!