Valley of the Jedi

Description
The Valley of the Jedi…a powerful nexus of force energy created after Lord Kaan’s ‘Thought Bomb’ trapped the force spirits of over one hundred Jedi and Sith there during the Seventh Battle of Ruusan a thousand years before what we see in Star Wars Episode I.

And yes I did have to look that up to get the details. :P

This place should be familiar to anyone who played the original Dark Forces games, and Jedi Outcast (where it briefly featured). Personally, when I say this map in the JK2 cut-scenes during the Single Player game I always wondered why the developers hadn’t made it into a proper map.

Somewhat embarrassingly I never actually played the two original Dark Forces games. Back when they came out I was still pretty new to computers, and I had no idea these games existed. My Jedi Knight odyssey started with the Mysteries of the Sith demo I got bundled with my new computer way back then. Even then it took me ages before I finally managed to figure out how to play it…

Ehem, I will stop embarrassing myself now…moving swiftly on!

Though I never played the original game with the Valley featured in, I have seen enough videos, screenshots and artwork to have a very good idea of what the location is like. In fact, personally this is one of my favourite locations and I have considered making a map of this before. But I am incredibly slow at mapping, so that never materialised! :P

Thankfully Plasma has released a map of it! (with a little persuasion from me ;))

Now as Plasma says in his readme:

[quote] This map was originally created by Raven and included as a sample map in Jedi Outcast.[/quote]

However, don’t let that put you off, as he then goes on to say:

[quote] Azuvector bugged me to do a VOTJ for MB2's new duel mode so I ended up fixing it up, adding some new textures as well as other stuff.[/quote]

And from comparing this with the Base JK2 version of this map, I can say that the author has made some very big improvements. Firstly, the force ‘well-spring’ in the middle (the big orange glowy thing in other words) has been changed quite a bit from the original. For one, it now actually glows, and since JK2 doesn’t support dynamic glow (at least not to my knowledge) Plasma must have added a glow shader to the effect, which as you can see is very effective.

Added to that are new textures which can be seen in the form of floor tiles in various parts of the map. They are well done and I think add some nice textural detail that was lacking in the original JK2 map. Also, although it gets quite dark at the edges of the map, you can make out that Plasma has also added various architectural features around the outside edge of the map. To me these look like entranceways or temples, and I think they add a good feeling of depth to the map that was also missing in the original.

The map is only available in Duel and Power duel modes, which I think was the right choice. Though you could have a small FFA in here, its much better suited as a Dual oriented map. The music fits very well, and the cinematic feel of the map is sure to make for some enjoyable duels!

As with all maps there are a few things I feel could be improved upon. The main one is that as far as I have seen, in other pictures of the Valley of the Jedi, the ceiling is meant to be covered in huge carved heads and faces. This is understandable though, putting that kind of architectural sculpture into a map would be a difficult task. Still, if it could be done, I think it would add much more detail and depth to the map.

Apart from that, all I could recommend is that it would be good if some new textures were made to replace the original Base JK2 ones, which aren’t quite as good quality as the rest of the textures in Base JK2 I feel.

All in all then a very big improvement over the original JK2 map that this was made from, with new glowy effects, features and textures among other things. This map is definitely going to stay in my base folder I think. ;)

Well, if you are a fan of the original Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight game or just like the look of this map, I recommend a download!

[b]Bot Support:[/b] Yes
[b]New Textures:[/b] Yes
[b]New Sounds:[/b] No
[b]New Music:[/b] Yes
[b]Game Types:[/b] Duel, Powerduel

~Nozyspy~