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Among Us maps begin their lives as little more than rough sketches and outlines, but eventually develop into fully fledged maps with their own unique personalities and layouts.
In celebration of Polus’s initial finalization, Innersloth shared the original draft of Polus through their official Twitter. Although the basic shape and idea for Polus is still visible in the initial draft, there are a few notable changes between the draft and final release.
The original Among Us design for Polus
The original draft shows that Polus always began as a big space with sectioned off hub locations. On the left are a few basic locations, including the security and electrical rooms. Interestingly, Medbay is also located on the left, next to the communications room as well. The central storage room is also missing from the early draft.
The bottom of the map features the office and meeting room, though it looks almost unrecognizable compared to the one seen in Among Us today. A long hallway connects the office to the specimen room, which is in turn connected to the hub in the top right, though this hub has only the admin room labeled.
At the very top is the dropship, and a single tower labeled “shields” is the only thing located outside.
The draft for the original Polus map in Among Us seems to have all the ideas retained in the final version, especially with the large, mostly empty central region. One of the defining traits of the Polus map that makes it so fun to play is that the map is large enough that players rarely run into each other accidentally.
Compared to The Skeld, with its tight corridors and frequent intersections through the center of the map, Polus encourages players to remain on the edges of the map as much as possible - something that can be seen even with this original draft.
Among Us moves from the drawing board to the final game
Unfortunately for fans of Among Us, there’s no way to know how many different iterations the Polus map went through before its final release. Still, it seems the developers realized that the map seemed a little empty, and the final version features a few, small, isolated locations in the center. Most notably are the inclusion of the weapons, communications, and storage rooms.
The main office hub was almost totally redesigned, and the admin table was moved there. The biggest change here, however, was that the hallway to the specimen room was shifted to the southern end of the main office. This likely helped contribute to the openness of the Polus map, and prevented the specimen room from taking up too much space.
The other two hubs, the security room and the lab, saw some smaller design changes but largely fit the same purpose as in the original draft. Lastly, it seems the idea for the shield generator was changed to the seismic stabilizers, and a second one was added to make it more threatening.
Polus is one of the best designed maps in Among Us, and the Among Us community seems to have latched on to it for that reason. Hopefully, the Among Us developers continue releasing information about these prior drafts so that fans can see just how far the game has come.
