Adjustments to Crystal Valley’s Polarity#1037
Looks to be the best casual stage in today’s livestream, but I think there are a few things that are stopping it from reaching its full potential. Most of the traffic was destined to be congregated towards the bottom of the stage, but I think the way it is now discourages fighting elsewhere more than it should.
The camera/blastzones being so close to the top disincentives people from playing in the higher regions. Even if all the players are in the top half of the screen, standing on any of the platforms has you fighting in an awkward camera angle, and because your character almost touches the edge of the screen and puts you in the magnifying glass if you jump. It goes against instinct to purposefully choose to go there because of how uncomfortable it feels, just like the top left area of palutrnas temple. On stages like hyrule temple, the camera pans up way higher in the top middle area, making you feel comfortable even when the blastzones are still relatively close. You can double jump up b and still not hit the magnifying glass iirc.
The top left section of the map could benefit from the platform extending the entire area of the gap. Especially if you wouldn’t be able to fall through it, leaving that little left/wood area as the fall through play. It would solidify 3 solid places to comfortably fight and would encourage more travel around the map. With the gap as is, there’s not enough space for two people to fight side by side without jumping, much less 4
As there are no platforms there, the abyss on the right side is to steep for anyone to go down. It currently reminds me of a more polarizing version of the bottom of cornerias cockpit, except no gun to stand on. I know camping is a potential concern, especially with playing online stocks only. If you put one of those wooden ledges, someone will go down there and hide (would be funny). If you put multiple to where it’s a semi-normal fighting pit, the stage might be too big and cause matches to go on too long. And it’s too late to let you travel underneath the mountain since it travels all the way down.
That’s why I propose a long, movable stone platform that you can’t fall through that travels vertically into the blastzone. However, make it so it travels in the blastzone long enough (5-20 seconds) so that if you ride it down too low, you will be forced to recover up the abyss. If you fail, you die since the platform is gone for so long. This makes it a game of chicken if you choose to fight someone there: have fun fighting while it’s slowly traveling up but SOMEONE has to run first when it starts going down. It used to be that the ultimate chad are to fight in a platfighter was the bottom platform of temple, but not it could be the crystal valley platform :0
-bonus: if you add the sinking platform, people can make the “who can survive the crystal valley cliff in rivals 2” video lol
Thank you very much for reading and for designing this amazing stage
Meant to add these