Why did Quake (and arena shooters) die? 

MIDEO

​@@isbibbi Schmideo.

@@CheezMonsterCrazy Shmiqeo?

Bideo

​@@skelebloodno mention of unreal tournament which is abandonware and therefore easy to find, has a player base due to being maintained by the community, and is extremely easy to get into with single player campaign ladders utilizing some of the best competitive AI ever acting as an interactive tutorial 👀

Yep, people complaining about Arena FPS being dead forget that when Arena FPS was actually popular, nobody played to the meta, and maybe 1% of the population played Duel at best. People barely even played FFA and TDM. The entire casual audience spent all their time in non-competitive custom game modes like Instagib, Freeze Tag, Zombies, and a quaint little mod known as… Team Fortress.

I was there to started with FPS games when they first came out by the time Quake 3 came around wow that was super nuts... By that point I had a career I didn't have the free time to really polish any level of skill. My attempts playing in hyper active arenas was really reminiscent of Smash TV... but I was one of the millions of enemies who was just getting obliterated. If you ever played Smash TV you understand the metaphor as soon as you spawn you might get to choose the location but you'd become nothing more than red paint almost instantly.. solo against a few bots was better for me

All these games are scattered all over the place now with so many different versions of the same games. Imho I think that Quake Live is a way worse version of Q3 but then who is going to play Q3A nowaday anyway? But then, now what just came out, a remaster of Quake 2 it's nice but once again it's another version of the same game, how can you expect to keep a constant player base if you get so many versions of the exact same games 🤔

Plus a lot of servers are filled with aimbots since the late 2000s

@@Marc-vt1jh facts! ;)

I played a unreal tournament 99 and 2004 more then any other game. I've never played CS or quake besides 4 and wars. The Unreal franchise will always be better in my opinion. I can go back and play it over and over with getting tired. I played unreal games when I was like 6 or so

Epic killed UT. They were making a new UT but then abandoned the team.

Thanks to Fortnite...@@TheWehzy

@@TheWehzy Billion dollar company yet they apparently couldn't afford to at least keep a skeleton crew working on UT4 or keep the official server or storefronts up for their flagship title. Amazing.

Fully-charged Impact Hammer up Sweeney's for this nasty dick move.

I really enjoyed fortnite but it meant that unreal tournament would be sent to an early grave... Unfortunate cause i was messing around with unreal tournament 3 around 2018 and i was excited to see ut4.... Oh man....

You are onto something. Tho i ever hardly played Halo so can't comment on how popular it became at that time .

@@KaraokeNig Halo 2 invented modern matchmaking (Halo's real sin I think) and Halo 3 was, in the U.S., one of the best-selling games ever only to be surpassed by CoD 4 soon after. I still remember being so sad realizing that most people liked CoD more. I saw the future.

Halo is also arguably the closest thing to an AFPS that still has mainstream appeal and was singlehandedly carrying the entire genre from 2007 (after UT3 flopped) to 2015 (Doom remake).

I'd say it's moreso just console gaming on its own.

cs is trash since they removed bhop :D

Those two issues feed into each other. Clan Arena is a pretty casual mode for Quake, and sure there are skilled players in it, but the general way you'd play Quake for the longest time was in big lobbies, just messing around. Removing community servers, and using rank systems ensures you're always just having a horrible experience if you're trying to learn or play more casually. Quake wasn't some kind of pro only game until it was made that way.

What I find particularly irritating is players at the top of their game fully advocating for new players to be put into stompfests against massively more experienced players (mostly by removing skill-based matchmaking) with arguments like "they will never get better at the game otherwise" and "it's unfair for good players to never be able to relax without risking to lose their ranking". First: how does getting stomped repeatedly without understanding what you did wrong a good way to learn anything and get better? Second: do you really like the game itself, or do you only enjoy stomping new players because it makes you feel good? Since the comparison to fighting games was made, there is rarely any situation in this type of game where you can die without understanding what happened, and you can actually see clearly what the opponent did and start learning from it. Analyzing your opponent's actions is exceedingly harder in a shooter.

@@f145hr3831jr The reason why pros and streamers say this is because most of them are too young or too brain crushed to remember server list. It’s a much better way to do matchmaking for all skill levels, and sure you can have a ranked mode as well, but generally allowing people to develop a feel for the game before throwing them in ranked or rank-less mm is better.

also the sense of community, because you could join a server and just spectate the players while chatting with the playersand other spectators.. while u wait for a spot to join in. now its just "oh jump into this 10 minute match, then go through 3 loading screens while u queue up for the next"

Also Quake did best thing changed history forever! 2 australian student created Quake mod called: Quake: Team Fortress 1996. This mod was masterpiece and all quake servers was playing this % 50 Half of the game. Second: Quake engine taked by valve software and created goldsource engine... i mean thats why Quake is very important changed world forever.

Just came here to comment this. Too high skill ceiling for noobs is what killed the genre.

Fighting games and RTS still enjoy major success, though RTS has been eclipsed by it's son MOBA which as you said So I don't really get your point, truthfully only FPSes had this issue, which is quite sad. Teams are fun though, it works well. TDM was a mode that can exist within an Arena FPS.

@@spaz113z Skill Floor more like it.

@@augustcederberg5904 What is that supposed to mean? Naturally there were other factors too but I'm talking specifically about arena shooters not RTS or fighting games.

CTF is best though IMO

Very true

Counter-Strike for instance is full of player-expression and style, thriving while fighting games (Street Fighter for instance) is suffering from the same characters and meta + pro players bitching about the game in Twitter. Mostly a NA thing. Let's say Quake and other Arena shooters made a comeback and they would be as popular as CS or LoL. I guarantee there would be constant bitching about mechanics, balancing and other stuff in Twitch / Twitter while EU / Asia would be dominating the scene as usual.

@@5uomalainen tbh when quakelive was popping off and still had tournaments around '09 '10 ( i think ) there was alot of bitching on ESR about spawn points, map rotations, item placement, weapon dmg output xD

I still remember some names from early TF2

yes I still remember going up against "KikeKiller1488" in Quake 3 Arena

I was also surprised, how can one talk about these games and do not mention the very best one. I would say the 2004 was a pinnacle of them all, after that, only worse titles came

Yeah. Where the hell is Unreal Tournament? I would even go so far as to say that UT99 blew Quake 3 out of the water in a ton of respects, and to not mention it is both a major disservice to the game and a major gap in the video's explanations.

@@restoreleader Flak Monkey :)

I had the same thought. UT4 is extremely fun. He only really mentioned Quake until the end of the video. Tribez was another really good one that people forgot about.

Yeah , why … i am too think UT Is the best arena online fps , I even play it from time to time ..there are some people still playing

TTK also plays a role. With low TTK even the veterans can be killed if they are caught off guard. The high TTK, however, gives so much room for error that the gaming veterans are virtually unkillable.

@@sergeydoronin1579This is why Bushido Blade is the best fighting game. Unironically.

There were Quake 3 mods that gave a rhythm to the matches, like Rocket Arena

Every game has it's frustrations honestly. The ebb and flow is precisely why I never got into Counter strike. The low ttk means you die very quickly and then have to wait a good 5 or so minutes only to get killed again. I found it incredibly annoying. Arena shooters failed because the devs mostly abandoned them. I used to play quake live back in 2015 or so and had a ton of fun everytime I managed to find a server. I especially loved clan arena. But the game barely got any updates and only the pros were playing. Then they decided to bring the game to steam and add a few newbie friendly features like load outs ( all they did was give older players an even more of an unfair advantage), a couple of new maps and made it fully pay to play. But after that it just got abandoned. Arena shooters can still succeed. They just need a popular company to push them into the mainstream.

@@saisameer8771 5 minutes? That's too much, if your team has tryhards that play slowly and survive until the last second maybe you'll have to wait 2 minutes tops until the next round. But that's rare, as most people rush everywhere. And I think the downtime is a good thing if you want to think tactically about why the enemy won that engagement

it works like this in every quake

Yeah, you pretty much described why these games are popular. You are the guy these games were made for, and most people are like you. And pretty much also most people felt the same way about arena shooters and arcade shooters in general. the skill ceiling was simply too much of a turnoff for people who just want to play "at their own pace".

Actually, the reason fighting games survive is because they have offline bot content and local multiplayer. A lot of the hardcore online enthusiasts of arena shooters and fighting games kinda forget... they're a fairly small niche; the majority of sales with - for example - Mortal Kombat? Come from people who never touch the multiplayer except with friends on the couch.

incidentally, i think that goes a long way towards explaining why doom 2 dm and ctf, while hardly anywhere near any of its peaks, is something that absolutely refuses to die despite being nearly _30_ years old: mappers realized it was a lot more fun if everyone spawns on ssgs like it's not a universal rule or anything, but 99% of pvp maps anyone plays is gonna have every life start you with the marquee weapon that can take an opponent from 100% to 0% with a good meatshot even if they have green armor, and will still do so p. reliably even if they have blue armor. and while that blue armor thing demonstrates how proper map control is still a powerful tool ( blue armor alone might not guarantee surviving an flubbed ssg joust, but green armor and a soulsphere will, and then there's the utility of the rocket launcher and plasma rifle and the sheer _devastation_ you can commit with bfg control ) it nonetheless goes a looooooong way in making sure that a freshly respawned player can immediately contest their opponent, rather than needing to go on a resupply route that their full-power opponent can intercept and convert into chain frags plus the primary movement tech can be reasonably felt out by just running around. as in, it's literally just realizing that you move _dramatically_ faster when running forward and strafing at the same time. there's extra depth to push it further, but you still get 67% of the effect solely through pressing two buttons and looking somewhat off to the side. it's certainly a fair bit easier to pick up than airstrafing, to say the least

Longtime FFA player here-- Duels absolutely have this problem, but it's specifically because you're matching 1:1 and guaranteeing that the leading player's resource management will set the tempo and pace for the game fullstop. FFA, at its highest levels, still had the insane skill expression and still had disgustingly hard games, but the way that the game flow works makes it MUCH less oppressive; not only does the existence of other players break up the gamestate enough to allow for isolated frags/resource collection from other players, but the existence of other players is exceptionally disruptive to a stacked player maintaining optimized routing. FFA adds an element of leveraging other players to your advantage, either with allowing you to find space to restack after a death or distracting other threats. The beautiful thing about FFA in my opinion is that this isn't restricted to high level, either-- Lower level players still will benefit from higher level players' split attention, even if they can't as efficiently leverage the others in the lobby. It's hard for me to imagine that duels' unapproachability (Essentially fighting game momentum levels in a strict 1v1) drove away the more casual playerbase, when I would have expected that the more dedicated playerbase would be the ones trying to engage in duels to begin with, and the casual players would stick around in more skill-variance friendly modes like FFA, Instagib, Freezetag, etc. I could absolutely be wrong and misjudging the casual appeal of duels, as again, that wasn't the most interesting dynamic for me (It is neither enjoyable to stomp somebody in a duel, nor to be stomped, either of which is the likely outcome of any given duel given its extreme momentum-based pendulum swing), but yeah

Speaking of map control and movement, one thing I've been thinking about having tried to watch some team format Quake Champs and Diabotical: Watching a Quakelike is mostly only possible in duel. In a team game, you have two packs of Ferraris roaming the map nonstop and there's little structure to the thing, fights feel like a series of drivebys with little rhyme or reason, while Duel has a comprehensible structure to it and a generally nice pace. Meanwhile, as a casual player, TDM and CTF are far more sensible formats than duel as outlined by the posters above. Now, contrast with tactical shooters, where the teams stake out, develop, and contest positions. That works, both for spectating and actually playing, and the positions can be static enough that you can work out plays on the mic. That's genuinely valuable. TF2 strikes a balance, but there's still some comprehensibility with the contested objectives and so on. OW1/2 is an absolute mess for an outsider to spectate, but fundamentally strikes a pretty good balance between arcadey madness and characters/teams fighting over positions and then devolving into an absolutely mad fireworks show. Amazing fun, if the meta is good. The bad metas we try to forget because they were... And all of them are team games, of course, which matters, as can be seen in team sports vs. 1v1 sports and in the rise of eg. MOBAs over RTS and so on. So if you wanted an arena FPS to live, IMO what you'd need to build is a game that's team-based and strikes a balance between letting people do zany things and the teams staking out comprehensible positions. The kind of zooming all around the map rotating pickups thing is, I think, the anchor that kills Quake-likes in the grander scheme of things.

You're right. I played Quake III Arena on the Dreamcast (with bots, because no internet access). Even on Dreamcast with mouse and keyboard (!) the last levels really were hardcore. I'm 100% sure I couldnt beat the bot game today, but I remember playing it with 13 or 14 years old and I needed A TON of time to make it. Booted up Quake Champions and got slaughtered. Problem is: back then I had plenty of time and motivation to "endure" and learn the machanics. Now as 34 years old under no circumstances I would play a game 100+ hours to learn it properly. It just isn't worth the effort. Gaming now for me is casual. If i want to "work", I go to work! Even remember playing against Xan on Hyperblast map Unreal Tournament 99. Guy was jumping left and right, doing flips and cooking himself dinner while I tried to survive.

Quake Live instagib is unbeatable.

Well damn. That's good to know!

and they can also answer any IT questions u happen to have

I used to host a server a few years ago for it. I kept it strictly stock with maps and higher airaccel but none of my friends ever enjoyed playing it as much as I did lol

I just wish the damn input lag was fixed for HL2DM.

@@sulphurous2656 that's not a problem I've heard many complaints about. Would you care to go into it more for discussion?

Oh wait a minute you're xeogin, I know you lmao

@@saltierdongs7760 likewise 😂

Yeah tribes was also pretty cool. I am still sad that Tribes 3 never really took off. It had alot of really cool ideas but it could not attract many new players and the old players were pissed that it was not tribes 2 with just better graphics, so they also did not really give it much of a chance.

@@MrSheduur it's not even out yet?

Wrong, the game design itself was to blame. Not skill

@@ExpertContrarian Not exclusive concepts. What I wrote adresses design and how it interacts with players of all skills. Fighting games and deathmatch are harder on mid/low skill players than team games. That's why TDM w/ objective modes are the most popular FPS MP games. In domination, a low skill player can hold points, and get easy captures, they can play objective, and be the "best objective player" on a losing team and feel fine about themselves.

Look at sports like Tennis, GOlf, Martial Arts, those are me vs. you and creates a similar dynamic to arena shooters.. like you said there is nothing to "offload" frustration aside from yourself. There are no cheese mechanics that allow players a quick regain or free kills like certain ultimates in OW2 for example. At the end of the day what made games like Quake 3 amazing was also their downfall. The insane movement, mechanical skill, strategy and positioning was incredible -- and incredible to watch as well. That unforgivingness gave the genre its' charm but it was also hurt players new to the game. Quake3/QuakeLive will go down as one of my favorite games of all time. The rush of dueling someone who's just a bit better than you and finally besting them is something games these days cannot replicate.

I feel like Tribes and more recently Titanfall 2 are great examples of how good (but hard) movement systems can really limit the audience for a game. Part of the reason why COD still has such a large place in the market is because its easy to lie to yourself and convince yourself that you're pretty good, all it takes is to win a few games, or when that fails look at your kdr. When you play a game with advanced movement tech, aiming becomes harder in general, and when someone is better than you, its easier to tell because you're getting eaten alive and cant seem to land a single shot, and while plenty of people still throw around the word "hax" as an accusation, when that's just how every good player is playing, most people will eventually confront that they're not in that group, or they'll quit to avoid it.

@@XeroShifterwell said

yeah, it's more fun to plant a carrot in farming simulator. Not every game if for everyone. i hate cards-based game but i am reluctant to tell that they "are boring and stupid" just because i can't seem to find point in them.

@@XeroShifter Oddly, the one game we have now with pretty meaningful movement tech is... Splatoon. The thing is that, despite being deep, having obscure tricks, and taking some time to learn, you can still be decent (but not top level) early on. Even then, a lot of the tech is rather intuitive, so it often leaves players feeling like they found some huge secret. Sadly, most people write the game off as a baby game and don't realize it's actually one of the closest things we have right now to a classic arena shooter. Leave it to Nintendo, I guess. But the internet's irrational hatred of Nintendo means even less people will find out first hand.

​@@purrpocalypse I wouldn't call the hatred for Nintendo irrational given their litigious nature towards things like community tournaments, but I agree that Splatoon is severely underrated, and is very close to a modern arena shooter. Splatoon is held back by a lot of its surrounding design elements sadly. It can be supremely grindy to unlock weapons and then tweak your gear when you're first starting out. The fact that you can't host lan tournaments, or really any sort of tournaments at all thanks to team shuffling. Nintendo's communications hosting service, and a bunch of other places where Nintendo has locked everything down. The core gameplay is awesome, the movement tech is well done, but it feels like Nintendo intentionally does a lot to ensure that none of their games can actually develop a dedicated scene that isn't fully in their control.

Would have being cool if Reflex Arena went open source, maybe the community could chip in some bucks now a then. Basicly what Xonotic is doing.

I'd software claims Quake Chsmpions was a financial success, I doubt they're lying.

Check QC:DE. ;)

Play Quake Champions. It is hella fun.

Boomers moved on. Now its their kids doing the fartnite dance..

I used to love playing duke nukem on ps1 with my brother and step dad

@@Notnone666 Loved it on ps1 and the n64 version, still have a ton of old console games saved. Didn't get into pc gaming much later..

Too bad he's supporting troony tunes.

@@UtubeH8tr troony tunes?

@@oyveyshalom IT'S TIME FOR TRAAAAAAAAAANIMAAAAAAAANIAAAAAACS THEY'RE LOONEY TO THE MAX THEY GOT BOLOGNA IN THEIR SLACKS THERE'S AN AXE WOUND IN THEIR PANTS. THEY"RE TRANIMANIACS!

Gianni kinda mid ngl

@@danielegglord i wont deny he's got skill, i'll give him that but yeesh budd, he's getting close to cringey teamfourstar dub levels.

You can still play Unreal Tournament online by installing some patches, there are still some servers

I Agree. Likewise, it can go the other way as well. Team Fortress 2 is one of the harshest games i've played yet because the skill range is so broad and very few people take it seriously, it is much easier for beginners to play.

Seriously. Diabotical was wonderful. It didn't help that a LOT of community-building features planned early on needed to be cut, either.

it was bad

@@goaway7904 How so?

I was interested in Diabotical when they were showing off some fun weapons and movement stuff that was not a copy of Q3. Then they released a Q3 clone but not as fun. I played for quite a while but I'm not surprised people didn't stay. I felt that it was focusing way too much on bein an esport that they forgot to make it fun for the general audience.

@@LaggyLuke But they DID have "fun weapons and movement that weren't a copy of Q3"... they included all that stuff...

Btw im a fan of your content :)

Hi herb! Funny that i came from ultrakill to quake champions and i like it a ton!

a bit late but it's called Xonotic!

Well, some call them pro and some just call them shitbucket. I have 0 reason to play multiplayer in 99% of games.

Played Q3 Arena on my Dreamcast back in the day against bots. Loved the levels and the game in general. After not having played any arena shooter for basically decades my brother asked me for Quake Champions and i got it too. I'm getting absolutely obliterated. Players saying: "ok, but you s*ck and need to learn. You need to watch youtube videos and learn to play properly dude! It's not the game, it's you dude!" Understandable - but I simply don't have the time, nor would i put the effort for "working" on game skill for 100 or even 300+ hours. Not worth my time. With 34 years of age, next to no video game is worth playing 300+ hours right now.

@@milan51259 damn I thought I was the only one that understood this basic concept of "I just want to play for fun, not to become a rocket-jump ninja"😂

@@mattialonghin_mr.l857 It's sad for the franchise they could not get rid of the hardcore-gamer, because these hardcore-gamers are only a few people basically. Back in the day there was hype for Q3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. Everybody played it - it was new, fresh and never seen before, so there were (very) good players, average and noobs. But Hardcore-gamers spent their life playing this arena-shooters and hype died down obviously in the last 20 years, so no noob or even average gamer wants to bother with the steep learning curve of movement and general skillset needed to survive them. The whole existance of the hardcore-arena-shooter gamer now is to tell the noob how much he sucks and to feel as masterrace. In the meantime they developed other fps and new generation plays it with much fun, while arena-shooters are for the 40 year old gamer with no life, but Quake. I also remember playing UT 99 mostly against bots or in LAN with my noob/average friends. This was mega-fun. But coming to internet game in Quake 3 for example is like going to dominatrix to get my a** whipped. Nobody sane would do that.

@@milan51259 I have to agree. The only logical way to resurect these type of games would be to get rid of hardcore players and let everyone start again fron zero. But you can't, new players need to be strong and to arm with parience and will, and they will at least be able to play without being reduced to a punching bag. I k ow this for personal experience, i am still considered a noob, but I can take some of these players sometimes

Quake Champions just "feels" worse than Live. My friends and I exclusively play instagib and Champion's rail gun feels very off and inconsistent in comparison.

Reflex was my first afps and I really wanted to get into it. I was so bummed it died after practicing 100+ hours on just movement alone, but I had so much fun.

QC is a game for no one. The game structure is still too Quake to bring in new players in droves, there’s no map editor, custom servers, and the heroes thing scared away a lot of veterans. The controls are also just straight up broken in QC, the mouse movement is way off. Compared to other FPS games it feels good, compared to like QL, Quake 4, or Reflex, the mouse is laggy and doesn’t interpret movements right.

"it ticked every box and was a technical masterpiece" eh, not really. performance sucked. it was too demanding when it came out, and that was after YEARS in early access where they really should have figured out how to optimize it so it would have a smooth launch. the same is true for Quake Champions which looked quite good but also demanded high end GPUs (GTX 1060 minimum) to play it at "AFPS framerates". Diabotical which you didn't mention had better performance but also laughably outdated graphics so PROPORTIONALLY SPEAKING it had the same issue really. you needed a contemporary GPU just to play it at all, when it looks like a game from the early 2000s. the bottom line is that AFPS have a completely different level of expected performance. time and time again devs go one of two ways: - think they can launch a 60 fps game with nice graphics. no. no, you can't in the AFPS space. stop doing this. - think they can cheat by making a really ugly game. no. no, you can't convince people to play a NEW, DIFFERENT game if it lacks nice graphics. With Reflex and QC the problem was people wanted to give these games a chance but at the end of the day the older games they were used to just felt sooo much better, which was 90% down to performance. With Diabotical the problem was that it doesn't warranted getting excited about since it's like a "Quake 3 but cartoon graphics and the character models float in the air which messes with your rocket aim" which absolutely nobody asked for. and it didn't even run well, just barely well enough.

Also Diabotical!

While I love Indie games, unfortunately they are limited by not having a ton of funding or employees to make games in genres that need larger budgets. This is especially the case with multiplayer games, since servers aren’t cheap, and the less players you have, the worse the experience is, unlike singleplayer games where the experience is the same regardless of how many people are playing. This makes them a lot riskier, which isn’t something many devs are willing to take. There are plenty of genres where indie games thrive, where few large publishers make games of, like Platformers, Metroidvanias, rougelikes etc. But for the genres where making an indie game is difficult, and bigger game publishers don’t care about, they slowly die of obscurity.

Doom eternal soundtrack

I say, as former UT99, year 2001 duel champion in my country, Amen brother :D. Even still got at home shirt signed from Gitzzz :D

It was also little things like linking that one weapon to other players to increase it's damage or healing output. Plus like many shooters, you could take a hit or two normally and shake off the 'error'.

@@vaclavnemec9053crazy man! « Gitzz » haha, I personnaly was ranked 7th on 1v1 worldwide for ut2k4, could never win against Winz lol

I wouldn't call COD milsim nor tactical shooter. Same thing with battlefield.

If COD/BF are tactical shooters then I'm Nikola Tesla

CoD is ARMA for the ADD-addled. Not actually a Milsim, but it looks like one, and mixes the intensity with arcade action. They were never going for realism, but they were definitely going for verisilimitude, at least with CoD4.

You can call them quake noob crybabies

Do you still play Quake Live?

To add to this, it also felt that innovation in the arena shooter genre died over time. It was basically the same thing from 1996 all the way to the early 2000's after which modern military shooters started to take over. I think UT 2K4 had the right idea combining arena shooter gameplay (albeit slowed down compared to Quake) with objective based gamemodes. It's still my favourite shooter of all time.

Yeah that was normal stuff. When you had put so much time into a shooter based on quake or hl, you were levels above anyone else, even people who considered themselves to be good because they could dominate some rounds on public servers. You did not even break a sweat most of the time. I cannot remember how many times I played regular folks in hl1 deathmatch or ut deathmatch modes (even though I never really played ut at a pro level) and it was a slaughterhouse for them which lead to people being frustrated, including me, because they had absolutely no chance against me. I did not play arena shooters alot, but my knowledge from playing team fortress classic and quake 3 fortress at a pro level was enough to absolutely dominate anyone but pro players in most quake3 mods and hl mods, as most of the gameplay and knowledge about weapon trajectories and where to aim depending on jump angle from players etc was enough to be virtually untouchable by lower tier players... the time spent really went into muscle memory, and like someone else here in the comments put it, it translated very well between similar games, so you always had that extra level compared to the normal players who played it casually.

there is an active ut99 discord with patches, servers and so on.

Fighting games work on consoles, they actually give a shit about aesthetics, they're easier for spectators to follow, they fill a unique gameplay niche, they have more to offer for beginner and intermediate players, and AFPS never had that mega hit to build off of like SF2/MK/Tekken/Smash.

@@ReddRambler yeah contrary to popular belief but even in the 90s afps was always niche really

Put simply: Fighting games have frequent gamestate resets and comeback mechanics, whereas AFPS games generally don't. You can get absolutely obliterated by someone in a fighting game, but the opponent's resource advantage (meter) only lasts through a single set, and a single set only lasts *at most* for a few minutes. Some popular fighting games like UMvC3 for example even have outright comeback mechanics through things like X-factor that scale up in power the further behind you are. In an arena shooter, someone getting on an advantageous cycle in a map can snowball and steamroll it, and you're just stuck getting your crap pushed in for 10 minutes with no real recourse. And that's just for a single round if you're playing round-based. Plus, in a fighting game you always have access to your full toolkit. In AFPS games a huge chunk of the strategic gameplay revolves around denying your opponent access to their tools (weapons, armor, powerups). Being on the receiving end of having your tools denied so you can't even express your full skill for long periods of time is frustrating and ultimately turns people away.

@@krad2520 The snowballing issue is why I wish Hoonymode became the standard instead of time based Duel. In Hoonymode when one player scores a kill, BOTH players respawn and the map resets. It's closer to how a fighting game works and goes a long way towards mitigating blowouts.

There's money to be made with an spectator sport. And fighting games are easy to grasp for a new audience. Player mashes buttons, hits other player. Arenashooters look very "messy" to someone who doesn't know what's going on, maps can be disorienting due to the 3rd dimension being heavily used, movement and resource management are basically alien to any viewer, until someone (or a 30min video) explains it.

But Double Jumping and Ledge Grabbing take no skill to perform, and aren’t as fun nor fluid as bhops

Bruh it has ms caps.

tried it yesterday. I used to play arenas as well as old cod titles in the promod version, no crappy stuff. matchmaking is way too randomly unbalanced and plus, players themselves, claim that the title is dead... i was hoping so bad to find a title to play cause i'm so sick of all theese battleroyale and such crappy games

map knowledge, timing and strategy are equally important in cs as they are in quake. so why do you think that these 3 things killed quake, but not counterstrike? i'd argue that counterstrike is even harder to get into. the combat mechanics are much deeper and in my opinion feel more unintuitive. learning spray patterns, utility, advantageous angles, economy, strats and so on. to me learning all that sounds very overwhelming to any new player, especially when a lot of these things vary from map to map. it's a slow competitive tactical shooter yet it's one of most, if not the most played fps game. so if both cs and quake are of similar difficulty, why is one at the top of the charts and the other one at the bottom? well 2 (3?) major things stand out to me: - quake does not have any content creators outside of its own bubble. cs has ridiculously big personalities behind it. even though most of them didn't build the csgo community in the early days, all of them certainly help keep the game alive. if something is constantly on 15 year old timmys social media feed he will most likely keep playing it. cs has had such a big social media presence over the past decade it'll most likely not fade into obscurity for the next decade. -quake is a synonym for duel. unfortunately duels aren't very attractive to todays players. you can't blame your teammates as there aren't any, you can't blame stupid game design because quake is arguably the most balanced shooter out there, you can only blame yourself and this breaks so many egos. duels are very mentally taxing and they are the spotlight of quake. - the size of the playerbase also kills the game. you boot up the game for the first time and the only players you will face have the quake logo tattood on their forehead. if quake would be as huge as counterstrike this wouldn't happen, you'd play against people that are just as bad as yourself. it'll stay this way unless there's a big influx of players over a short period of time. i don't think quakes gamedesign is at fault for the small playerbase. if anything it looks very attractive to lots of cod/battlefield tryhards, they just never heard of it, and if they did try it at some point in time, they probably got run over by an average quake player. we get singled-out shooter-refugees instead of a single big wave of shooter-refugees...

@@krob_ Well there's a big reason I didn't mention counterstrike, and that is because it's definitely the Quake of "realistic" military shooters. I'd say it shares more DNA with Quake than CoD. It has all the same problems, although arguably they are specific to the defuse game mode. By contrast if you look at Counterstrike TDM servers, it's casual as hell. You can jump in as a total noob and run around getting a few kills and end up on the middle of the board. That's what made the likes of CoD popular. You don't NEED intimate map knowledge and memorisation to do well, you just need good game sense and reactions. TTK is short and there are no items that make you tank more damage. It's a pure contest of who can put the reticle on their enemy, and control the recoil/spread of their chosen gun better. That is, in most people's view, a much more level playing field. Thing is even when people think they like the idea of arena shooters, comparing it to the more modern type of shooters, most of the time the reality doesn't line up to the nostalgia. I know that myself. I used to play Q2DM, UT99, Q3A and UT2004 constantly as a teenager, and I loved those games. But going back to them now, I can only have fun against bots. What we really need is just a game with all the visual style and tropes of UT/Quake, but the mechanics of a CoD/Battlefield.

THIS. Perfect commemt, shows actual critical thinking. I agree, this is the best explanation I've seen. Personally though I still love these games and think Quake Champions is near perfect - it just needs more modes and maps!

Opinion worth a video

TL;DR for the following: Bring back single player campaigns. If you're not comfortable with a game's systems, it feels pointless to learn them from the ground-up for PVP with said game's experienced playerbase. To start from an angle I haven't seen; I play a lot of rhythm games, and they're hard as nails. The skill floor is high(leading to a lot of people quitting very early), and the skill ceiling is basically just "how fast can the human body move and process information". You'd expect there to be a stagnation, or falling-off and death of the genre, if difficulty was the only thing at play here -- but you don't see that. If anything, the genre is growing.(thanks to a particular smash-hit title that shall not be named) But the primary cause, I think, for people continuing to get into and play this genre of entrenched mechanically skilled freaks, is that ... there's no obligation to compare yourself to anyone else, at any time. You don't have to get fragged by a veteran -- who's been playing since the genesis of the genre -- 100 times, you don't ever have to see tournament-level players. You can learn and grow at your own pace, comparing yourself only TO yourself, quite literally only playing against "people of your own skill"(read: exactly yourself). I, myself, am laughably terrible compared to experts and veterans at the genre, however: I can still outplay advanced players(read: with 1000+ of hours of experience themselves) completely and wholly on the basis of raw skill. Obviously it's a different wheelhouse entirely, being a genre defined by minimal player expression and "self-improvement as an intrinsic goal"; but I still feel as though the point of "let people learn on their own" has merit. Look at a game like ULTRAKILL, which echoes the DNA of an AFPS and still has a massive and ever-growing playerbase, in spite of (or possible BECAUSE of) its incredible depth of mechanics. The thread in common here is, once again, single player. People can learn at their own pace, come to a point they're happy with, and hover there. There's never any obligation to compare oneself to others, and doing so is entirely of one's own volition. Back to AFPS as a whole, a sentiment you'll see a lot of "I started in single player." The roots of the community itself are not strictly in those who got roflstomped over and over by absolute titans of player skill -- If anything, it's people getting comfortable with the game long before looking at PVP as an option. Once there, you can get destroyed without losing steam -- You've already invested the time, you love the game, and now there's a new sea of skill depth you can explore beyond what you already know! But if you don't already like the game ... why bother? The death of the single player campaign has, in my opinion, ruined a LOT of potential with prototypically multiplayer genres. I don't mind getting pummeled by veterans in a game I already enjoy, but if my introductory experience to a game is going "Oh, I have literally no chance here. What's the point?" then I, and many others, will simply cut ballast and leave. I feel like the modern unlock-as-you-play-more secondary mechanics in shooters are the fill-in for what would've once been the campaign -- Instead of learning everything piecemeal through a campaign, going through the levels and getting access to more tools as time goes on, you instead get dripfed it from the game system such that you don't get overwhelmed, as well as to give you that extrinsic sense of forward momentum. To bring it back to rhythm games, approaching a multiplayer-only AFPS today feels equivocal to loading up a new rhythm game, selecting the highest difficulty version of the hardest song in the entire setlist, and promptly eating shit. Obviously one needs to challenge themself in order to improve, but you need to walk before you can run. When your only option is playing against 30+ year genre veterans, it can feel borderline sisyphean to even attempt to breach the genre. And to those entrenched 30-year genre veterans reading this: Please look up gameplay of somebody like DDX playing the game "Sound Voltex", and ask yourself: If this was the skill level expected of you when you started a new game, would you even bother?

@@NoxiousAffection Matchmakig could also help a lot but just suggest that and some people lose their shit about not being able to play against noobs.

I think it’s first and foremost a tac shooter but has lots of arena fps elements so it kinda treads the line in a way which is awesome

I guess the problem as stated in the video is that once there is a number of 'gud' players after the first few months, arena games become progressively less fun for casual players as they're so skill based.

The issue with modern games is Big influx of players, it's fun, people don't know how to play and are figuring it out, everyone has fun, overwhelmingly positive. Some people filter out for whatever reason. Staying players improve, and improve. New player comes in? Met with a wall of everyone who was playing the game already, leading to noobstomping which isn't fun. They then leave. Not enough new arrivals to offset the player shedding means the population dwindles, only the most hardcore players remain. They fight each other over and over. They get bored of the meta that's absolutely required to win now because of both playing the meta at such a high skill level. They ragequit and now it's a dead game with nobody for those new arrivals. Dead game. People optimize the fun out of it. Half the options aren't viable choices to be even remotely *good* against the population, if not a good 70%.

That’s where all the money was coming from and since money is a priority over all else well… it didn’t help that the 00s was when it was already starting to fade so while it sucks I can’t blame them

I don’t blame their conservatism though considering that modern gaming is mostly just Skinner box bs. But they should be more open to weapon balance changes, new weapons, modes, etc. even be open to matchmaking and a proper ranked system. These guys will give halo some shit, but they need to admit that matchmaking and ranking systems are a good thing. Community servers still have a place, however! Especially if subcommunities want their own rules and tweaks!