Smart, procedural animations - shallow, skin deep criteria.
Good animations tell you what your opponent is about to do (see Dark Souls). A few of the animations here are a bit too fast and similar to read properly.
There is a more pressing problem in the game with the animations, that happens a bit too often. For example, if you try to reach a vent or even jump over a fence, there will be times you can't because the respective animation didn't play so I would have to jump some 2/3 before the doll grabbed the ledge.
Focus on long lasting competitive balance - Valve, Blizzard et al. have been doing that since the turn of the millennium.
Valve not really. CS as always been absurdly broken and it had very few updates (after all 1.6 was a fan mod). And TF2 is not really competitive.
As for Blizzard. Well World of Warcraft was unique in that regard in it's time. But this, as he puts it, "focus on long lasting competitive balance" is something that really became of significant importance in 2013/4 when competitive multiplayer games started to gain their current popularity.
Greater readability and conveyance - self referential logic, whilst showing a modern game which is a rainbow clusterfuck of conveyance
One of the biggest problems this game has IMO, is that most of the maps are hard to read, navigate and manage. Take the cinema example he showed. That map is too cluttered to not only feel like a cinema theater, but also favors greatly the spy players and severely handicaps the merc players - because it's rooms are to big and full of obstacles, you spend a good chunk of your precious time ziz-zaging trough them, ignoring the various other equally bad designed rooms and in the end you don't even do a proper search.
Then even on the better designed maps like river mall you still have the recurring problem of room labels. There are areas of the map where you can efficiently identify and report player/camera/objectives locations, but for the most part you can't. And since this is a tactical competitive multilayer game, being able to do this is highly important.
And this is something, modern multiplayer games do very well. Even in Rainbow 6 Siege if you remove the compass+room label+floor UI component, you could still in every map very effectively communicate with the other players exactly because the level design was made with his very principal in mind. This is something these modern games do very well. Their maps are clean, organized and even the most complex ones can be easily memorized in 2/3 rounds.
And this also ties back to the previous point about lasting balance and player base. But then again this I this also easier to maintain nowadays since:
- everyone has Internet, and therefore everyone can go to the game's forums and discuss about this and test shit; making the Devs continue to work on the game;
- all these games are played on DRM; so the devs can regularly update their game's for as long as there is a significant player base.
That's why one of my favourite maps in this Versus game is a recreation of the first sections of Shadow Moses. It really resembles the original game, but has enough changes to suit this game. It has 2 floors of verticality; enough vents to acess the most important parts; at least 3 entraces/exits in every room; it doesn't have the room label problem since you can very easily identify them; it has nice porpotions, it's well lightened and filled with enough obstacles for a spy to hide; it's clean and very well organized so a merc can very well patrol it; doesn't come off as unnatural unlike the cinema and others; and overall it's has good and memorable level design.
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