When details conflict with the gameplay

Unreal Tournament DM-Malevolence

A long time ago I took this map and edited it. I wanted high resolution shadows and better lighting. The same thing that I did with deck16. I'm using this map to document one mistake that I made. The mistake is that I looked at the water and the floor of both areas to the left and to the right and thought that extending the water to cover a wider area would be cool. The funny thing is that whoever made this map placed two storm drains and they explain why the water didn't flood the areas to the left and to the right. For some reason I completely ignored them and just had this idea of flooding the whole area.

One day I was in a server and players were talking about how this map of mine was worse than the original. Because the expanded flooded area had a huge impact on the gameplay. I asked why and one player replied that the added waters create much more noise. It was possible to hear players walking and splashing waters over a much wider area than before. The thing is, Unreal Tournament doesn't have realtime audio raytracing to allow players to pinpoint the location of a player by hearing the sounds. Even if it did, I was playing with low volume because the sounds from the weapons were too loud for me.

This isn't much different from the mistake in deck16 where I modified the geometry around the two lifts area, unintentionally making it impossible to perform a jump boots + lift jump to reach the redeemer.