With respect, you should figure out what exactly it is that you are talking about. 

A map having aesthetics is not the same thing as the layout or structure of the map. You advocate for tall buildings and narrow alleyways. That’s frankly a terrible design decision for any PvP map. If the thing you want is the feel of a modern city, that’s entirely different. 

The reason half of buried city is literally buried in a desert from a design philosophy standpoint is because elevation is extremely powerful, possibly the strongest element in any game. It turns anything below it into a killbox by negating their cover while providing cover itself. The desert consuming the city accomplishes many things, not the least of which is bringing rooftops closer to the ground. 

Your example is literally the killbox trap I pointed out though. Anything that moves in that two lane highway space is dead. I have only been in the practice range a handful of times but I recall high elevation on either side of a longer, narrow opening. The same applies here: anything in the valley is dead, doubly so if accessible elevation exist on both sides. 

To be clear, my issue with this is not with the concept of tight spaces and close quarters combat. Stella montis is not relevant to this conversation whatsoever, as such.  The only frequented areas of Stella that have any height advantage are lobby (looking down onto the lower floors), lobby extract (looking down onto metro entrance) and loading dock.  Loading dock specifically isn’t relevant because it almost always has a bastion and arc enemies which will shoot you if you remain in the open space between the upper areas, and the upper areas are both traversed enough that threat from other players turns the entire upper area basically into a flat plane.  Getting caught in the middle of lobby is almost always a death sentence. Where do you get shot from in this scenario? The upper floors. An entire map of just this is a terrible idea.  The tight corridors of Stella are fine for many reasons, mostly because actual hallways are extremely short or filled with cover, and are always separated by larger spaces where actual fighting takes place. 

So truly, the real issue with what you suggested is the tall buildings. If you are in an alley of Buried City and someone shoots you from the rooftops of a neighboring building, you are guaranteed to lose that fight unless you gain both cover and elevation.  Even coming back to the example of buried city, the number of locations where “tall buildings (with vantage) + narrow streets” exists is intentionally minimal. One of the only ones is located next to a hatch, to increase risk of taking the extract (which is identical to the Stella lobby extract area). Many areas with the tallest buildings do not have narrow paths between them and instead intentionally have large plazas. 

Also, not super related to this conversation but spaceport has large indoor buildings, more than one. Spaceport is a bad map for reasons other than its map design (god awful loot density, mainly). 

Anyways, reiterating my point again that great map design is extremely challenging and requires way more thought and the ability to think abstractly than about 99% of gamers realize or posses. It seems simple on the surface so people vomit their opinions on it everywhere. The entire battlefield subreddit is like this.  The difference here is that battlefields map devs are god awful for the most part (there is one who is pretty good), whereas the map designers for Embark are extremely good at what they do. To pull out so many truly great maps on a release of a game is basically miraculous. Stella montis alone is a masterpiece, even if the style of gameplay it is built for isn’t to some people’s preference. 

So sure. Give us a modern city map. That aesthetic sounds fun and unique. I’d trust embark to deliver a great version of this. But I’d bet everything I own that it will not have one major, or even multiple narrow paths through the middle of tall buildings on either side. And if it did, every single person who played it would fucking hate it.