Razzle, no theme
...
I didn't see anything like a cave or a castle or a western theme.
Eh... which version of razzle have YOU been playing?
Most maps do have some semblance of a theme - even if they're just a bunch of bunkers and barrels on a grass field. If it's pulled off well, it can be a good looking map that simulates a real life paintball field. There are, of course, those maps made by new mappers which randomly use every texture available with no rhyme or reason - like grass for walls and crates for floors, but those maps are usually quickly dismissed and disappear. Of course, there are some players who would be perfectly content if all maps looked like that and the players were just big, colored boxes. The problem is, it turns new people away from the game. Yeah, this game is probably never going to catch up with the top of the line games, but at least we can work to make it visually equivalent to things like CS and other popular games that gamers have become accustomed to.
There's also a difference between theme and visual quality. Take this map, Cavern, for example. It has a theme -- it's all cave oriented, but it isn't executed very well. The walls are blocky,textures are misaligned, etc. Compare it to, say, routez. Routez has a mixture of textures like metal plates, stone tiles, bricks, marble, wood, jail bars, tiles, grass, rock, barrels, crates, fences, water, metal, slime, stone, cement - practically everything available in the paintball2 texture library. Each area looks different, and there's a mixture of mazes, ramps, stairs, balconies, bridges, ladders, elevators, jumps, etc. There is very little in the way of a consistent theme, yet it
looks better visually than Cavern, or many other themed maps, for that matter.
Of course, themes and visual quality often go hand in hand. If you make one wall one type of rock (like the grey rock, for example) and another wall in the same area a different type of rock (such as the orange canyon rock), there's a big lack of consistency and things look out of place. Even if the walls themselves are executed well and look natural independently, putting them together may ruin the visual quality of the map.
