Some constructive criticism to assist the improvements being made to your map:
Major Issues:
- Dialogue: The loading screen text, the cinematic text, the quest text... all of it is written in broken English that reads about as fluidly as shards of glass. You repeat yourself and use boring and cliched words. Make the dialogue more imaginative and readable, and the map will give a better first impression.
- The Theme of the Map: Its obvious you are going for an ancient Greek theme focusing on the Titans, Spartans, etc... Which is fine. However, when you set such a clear theme, you must stick to it in your map. Gods and Titans on the same team? No. In Greek mythology the Gods and Titans were constantly at war. Make the 'boss' Gods fight some Titans in a cinematic before you fight the boss itself, just to show the conflict between them. Also, the Godlands is a place only inhabited by the Gods and Titans, right? So why is there a huge camp of other humans, if it is such a mystery how the one human knight got there? Either explain how they got their, or change the camp to something more mythical/something that fits with the story. One other thing: Werewolves? Werewolves feature nowhere in Greek mythology, and they do
not fit in your map. I assume that you were merely browsing models in the workshop and picked your enemies from any cool looking ones that you found. That would be fine if this map didn't have a set theme other than monster-killing, but these enemies do not fit in. Either remove the werewolves, or consider removing such a solid theme from the map.
- Terraining: This was a
huge issue for me. I sincerely hope that your terrain is just there for testing purposes and you are not considering calling that terrain 'well done' or finished. Because it really isn't. There is no height difference apart from the starting hill, the paths are boring and straight, the doodading is repetitive with little imagination and gives the whole map a very bland feeling. The transitions between areas are jerky and sudden, and look verrrrrrrry bad. Your terrain needs a serious overhaul if it has any hope of being a half decent RPG map, and fast. If the terrain of an RPG is boring, I wouldn't expect many people to bother getting very far in your map, I know I didn't.
- The Hero's Abilities: All three abilities have bad descriptions, for starters. Secondly, there are carbon copies of vanilla Warcraft III spells, just with different names and icons. This makes the combat with the hero will bland, boring, and old. You really need to give him some custom made abilities, or at least abilities that are more appropriate for a 'knight'. Since when to knights summon tornados or burn an enemies mana? Knights are mellee fighters that use their own strength and their weapons in fighting, not magic. In conclusion: Overhaul his spells, put some actual effort into them, write the descriptions in standard English and make someone else proof read them before publishing the map again, and remember what kind of hero you are making the spells for. You don't even have the make the spells yourself, you could always request someone in the 'requests' section to make some for you, you only have to have the original ideas.
Items, and the Hero's Model: Another super huge issue. Make it so that only one set/weapon can be held at one time, or you get the stupid issue of about 3 different item models overlapping, which looks ridiculous and gives the impression of laziness and no effort going into the item system's design. Also on this topic, you need to give the Hero a model that has no default weapon. Either ask the author of the model for permission to edit out the weapon (or to get someone to do it), or change the model entirely to something that has no starting weapon/armor. This is because if he already has a starting weapon model you cannot get rid of, and he picks up another weapon, it (
again) looks stupid and not thought out. Change his model ASAP so the items actually look decent. Also, I noticed that when I picked up the Olympian Set and then put it down again, the model of the shield stayed on my character, so I would assume you are using a special effect to anchor it there instead of a passive item ability; if this is the case, I would recommend changing the special effect to an item ability straight away, as the purple shield model just stayed on the hero regardless of whether he even had the set in his inventory or not.
Minor Issues:
- Icons: Overall, I love the UI of this map, it really does fit the theme that you have set. However, the basic command icons (move, attack, patrol, etc...) do not fit in at all, nor do they complement a 'knight' hero at all, nor do they fit in with the UI. If you were going for an Aztec hunter hero/theme, then they would be fine, but you are not. Go for something more brutal and less focused on nature.
Also on the topic of icons, the ability icons have no 'disabled' icon, meaning that whenever you go into the abilities tab to learn one of them, each ability (apart from the shockwave copy) has a green square instead of a proper icon. This looks terrible and should be fixed straight away, being as it is easily remedied. I assume you downloaded custom icons for them; if so, they should have come with another icon starting with DIS in the filename, which should also be imported with the correct path so the greyed out abilities still have an icon. The correct path will be on the page you downloaded the icon from.
- Too many custom Models, Icons, etc... Not only does this make the map size
much larger than it should be, but it is also hugely unnecessary. There is already a huge wealth of models and textures at your command, yet it seems you have tried your very hardest to replace even the most basic doodads, units, or item icons with custom made ones for some reason unknown to me. There is
nothing wrong with using default models and icons, it doesn't make you seem any more lazy (the abilities did that).
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Right! That's what I have to say of your map thus far, just thought I would chip in now because it is so early in development that it has a chance of being saved. If you address all of the issues I have listed, it may well turn out as an alright RPG