Multiplayer Strategy Guide for FPS Games

Are you someone who enjoys playing first person shooter games? Are you someone who is interested on why these games are so addictive and challenging? And why kids, teenagers, young adults, and even adults can't get enough of them? In this guide I want to focus on specific maps though a variety of games, give general strategies for maps, in an attempt to increase individual player's map sense and knowledge of what is going on around them. In these games, gamers eventually hit a point in which they hit the best of their knowledge in games, and they need some type of guidance to get to the next level and be better then they currently are. And see the games they play in a different light.

What you will need:

• Pen
• Pencil
• 10 minutes
• Attention

My view on map design is quite simple. I am going to show you some overshoots of maps from two popular games that easily demonstrate what I believe is the easiest way to view all maps for first person shooter games. The first will be a snapshot of a map Mirage on a popular game called CSGO.

Definition: Map Flow - A map's design to flow players through the map, show the movement of players from one place to another in certain patterns and lanes.

See Image 1 then image 2;

You see that in image one the overview of the map. Now look at the next picture.

Attention: This is very important for understanding how maps work! You see the grid with 4 boxes, almost a reverse tic tac toe board. This is my entire philosophy of their being three lanes: Top, Mid, Bot; then Left, Mid, Right. You see this pattern is flexible, clearly you see in this drawing that there are some lines that go through walls, and simply because this is a generalization not the definition for all maps. But having this knowledge of how the map looks is crucial for competitive understanding.

Now I will show a popular map from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2: Terminal

See Image 3 then 4

Attention: This is the next map that also displays the grid layout perfectly. A lot of people understand this map, and i think it does a great job of showing what i mean by grid layout. These lanes fit perfectly into the map itself with even less exceptions. You can see the flow of this grid layout, and it makes the map's flow easy and understandable.

Hopefully by now you have a general understanding of the flows of these maps, and if you see yourself on a map ever, you can easily draw this grid and overlay it on whatever map you are on and understand where people will most likely be coming from. This is what I will attempt to teach you in this Instructable.

As I mentioned in Step 1, this takes a long time to figure out, exactly what I am talking about. What I want to show you is the flow of these maps, and in certain situations, what direction you should most likely be looking to find enemies, especially in a game such as Call of Duty which is very fast paced. First I want you to draw a grid similar to mine in the previous Step. Its quite simple if you saw it, on your paper draw a grid with four total boxed as shown in image 1.

Attention: This is the most important part of this entire tutorial. You must label each of these lines in your grid.

As I mentioned in the intro we have 6 names to distribute, Top, Mid, Bot, and Left, Mid, Right. I think they are self explanatory, but I want you to view maps with these 6 lanes, and when you die in one of them, think about how many of these lanes have access to your position. And hopefully you will start to see why some positions are too exposed and you should never be in certain places on maps.

See image 2 and you will see my labeling of my grid

If you had to guess where most deaths are on maps, by just looking at this grid, where would you think the most deaths come from? Left? Top? or is it a combination?

Just to quickly introduce you to the next step, there are 5 places that everyone needs to watch out for, and if you understand these 5 spots you will have a better understanding of how to play on any first person shooter maps.

As I hinted at in my last step, there are 5 main points of interest in this grid. And this is where almost all deaths occur in first person shooters with few exceptions. The more intersections the more vulnerable you will be. These are not where you should be spending any amount of time. For example the center of this has the most intersections with 4 lines, therefore that is not the place you want to be, but it is the place you want to be looking because other people will be running through this area frequently.

The center has the most lanes intersecting with 4 and the other four circles all have three lanes intersecting it. These highlighted positions are danger areas, which cannot be avoided but these are where 90% of battles and gunfights are going to take place. With this knowledge you can see that there are strategies that need to take place in order for you to be successful in these high volume areas. With this in mind, quickly I will turn to an in game example

In this video the B site is the center of the map. As you will notice he is never in that center at any time. He runs through it once, and he spends very little time in the center. He is always flanking around to get a better positioning, and never staying in the same spot for very long. This is an older map from Modern Warfare 2, but I would advise getting this map and drawing the grid and watching where he is looking, never worrying about what is behind him because he is aware of where his teammates are. That is key to understanding where to look, and i think the first 3 minutes of this video are worth watching and analyzing.

Attention: If you look at the paths I put in the images, you will notice the orange path is his first trip, and green is his second. Watch the video and think about it the over view of the map. Notice how he is always looking toward the middle or the left-mid intersection. His game sense is fabulous and a great example of what I am trying to show here. Only watch the first 3 minutes.

Thank you for reading this Instructable. While some of you may not be very experienced in the games and not be very familiar with the content, I hope that you can understand a little about what the grid representation is trying to to display. Hopefully you now understand what is happening with map flow and maybe you can make your own theories on how maps work. Thanks for reading!