Route maps for Hajin: plan it in orange, share it, hear it on the move

A route is a promise you make to yourself

Before a deployment, a squad will usually say something like "we go from here to there, then to the exit", and then forget half of it by the second firefight, because the plan was a conversation and the conversation is gone. Nothing about that is a failing of the players; a plan that lives only in memory has to compete with everything else that happens. What we are planning is a way to write the plan down, on a map, in a form your squad can all look at. That is all it is, and we think the simplicity is the attraction.

The idea: a sort of Google Maps for Hajin

Think of it as a sort of Google Maps for Hajin, out of game: a picture of the zone, the thirteen major places and their threat bands marked on it, and a line you draw from where you land to where you want to leave. The line is orange, chosen because it stands out against terrain, and you can lay it over the places you mean to pass through. Its purpose is preparation, and it would be used before you deploy and not during, because a map you are fiddling with in the middle of a fight is a map you are losing the fight over. The comparison is imperfect, since Hajin is a fictional zone with its own rules and there is no live traffic to report, but the habit it encourages is the useful part: look at the whole of the ground first, then commit to a line through it, then say the line out loud to the people who will be walking it.

Drawing the route

The sensible shape of a route here is a sequence of places and stops rather than a set of exact coordinates, since the game itself names the areas you are in and we can only read what the screen shows. You choose a start, you choose the places in between, and you choose an exit, with a spare in case the first is occupied. We would also want the map to carry what the intel supports, the threat band for each place and where a gas mask is wanted, so that you can see the cost of a route as well as its length. (Where the sources say nothing, the map should say nothing, and not look confident.)

Sharing it with your squad

A route that only one person has is a suggestion, so the second half of the idea is sharing: you make a route, and the other Wing Mait users in your squad receive it, see the same orange line on the same map, and can follow the same plan. How the sharing would travel, whether as a file, a link or a code, is still undecided, and we would rather settle it with players than assume it. The point is that everyone arrives with the same picture, which is what a shared vocabulary of place in our callouts guide is also for.

Callouts and team GPS →

Walking the route aloud

Here is where the voice comes in. Because the compass shows the name of the area you are in, we can tell when you have entered the next place on your route, and say so: "Imjin Farmland. Next, Deadtown, heading 204." Leave the route and the voice can say that too. I suppose the limitation should be stated plainly. Without a true position fix we only know your place at the granularity the game shows, which is by area, and so the walk would be a series of checkpoints and not a blue dot sliding along a line. For a squad moving between named places, that may well be enough.

What we do not yet know

There is quite a lot. We need the Hajin map art and a reliable scale, we need to confirm how the compass behaves in the release build, and the sharing route has not been chosen. We also do not know how much of the zone can be read from place names alone, and we will find out only by playing it. Nothing about the zone's loot routes or exfil positions is published, and a route map will not guess them.

Status, and why we are telling you early

Route maps are planned, not shipped. Wing Mait today ships for WARDOGS as a 0.9.5 beta and the DMZ pack is in development, not released, with anti-cheat certification not done; the app watches your screen only and has no approval from Activision. We describe the idea early because we would rather hear what a squad would want from it before we build it. Follow along at /dmz/.

MW4 DMZ hub →