LAN parties were the best. Such great times. The convenience of online gaming is great, but nothing like the feeling of everyone bringing their setups together and staying up all night eating junk food and laughing and yelling at each other.
I once attended a LAN party for 12 days straight (slept at my computer between gaming sessions) with over 20 other guys playing around the clock. What an experience! LAN > Online Gaming. I still have saved replays from playing StarCraft 1 that are now almost 25 years old from that same LAN party. lol
@@adrianthom2073 During one LAN party (we use to host or attend one every Monday after school), we once had a neighbor call the cops on us because she thought we were steeling TV's (carrying our computers into the house). The police officer showed up, leaned into the house to see a bunch of nerdy kids playing video games, immediately leaned into his radio and called off the investigation. lol None of us even got up from our chairs to greet him at the door... NOT DURING MY GAME OF MECHWARRIOR!
The Norwegian demo group The Errors started hosting a *monthly* LAN-party at a local youth club back in 1994. 10BASE2 was the norm, USB drives didn't exist, nor did CD-ROM, and there was no Internet anywhere but at universities. Only a gaggle of young nerds with (mostly) beige computer towers and heavy CRTs playing whatever game was the new fancy. There was a lot of multiplayer DOOM and Command & Conquer, I remember. :) Errors Party is _still_ active, though now it's slightly larger and held twice a year.
On of the things I miss as much as arena shooters was touched on very briefly in this video. The simple phrase "join a server". Joining a server meant you got to know people, because we'd join the same few servers every day. From that, forums and communities grew and friendships were made. Some of my best friends today are people I met in 1998 playing Quake 2. Even as recently as 2016 TF2 still had this. These days it's all matchmaking, and we seldom see the same people more than once, let alone often enough to form a relationship. I've played Overwatch for nearly 8 years now, and I've made zero new friends from it, compared to the many I made from playing Quake 2/3, UT2004 and TF2.
This is more important than people realize. While you had access to every server you'd normally stick to the ones that had the best ping which meant that you'd keep seeing the same faces. You'd also figure out the server skill hierarchy as the same names would often stick to the top of the leaderboard, there's much more of a bell curve with the skill spread rather than a flat line and that's something I honestly miss as it was easier to compare yourself across what the playerbase could do.
If you're looking for a great arena shooter that has a pretty solid community, would definitely recommend Open Fortress. Totally free mod based on some old leaked TF2 source code and it plays like a dream, with the obvious bonus of the TF art style to boot.
Even old WON based Counter Strike and early GameSpy had this, heck it even followed into early steam for universities into the mid 2000s "who has rcon access, change the map!" that phrase and many others helped develop remote ops for a shit load of tools because us gamers grew up with that mindset.
Unreal Tournament was not just a regular game, it got alot of generations into drum and bass, it was a culture. And they killed it over a soulless game.
My problem with modern shooters is too much "down time." With arena shooters, you have nice short respawn times so even if you're not doing well, you're still "in the action" for the majority of the time. Because of that, deaths aren't frustrating, they're just learning experiences.
I'm the same man. I hear you. I can play CoD series as they are enough to be said fast paced game but I no matter how many times I've tried, I cannot get on to CSGO or Valorant type of games man...
Yeah, it really surprises me that Battle Royale games have taken off so much. The concept is interesting, but whenever I see someone play it there just seems to be so much waiting. Sitting around in a lobby, loading and counting down, and then running around hiding and looting alone until your get shot and killed in two seconds, and that's that. In Q3 or UT you just click "join" press space and then start blasting non stop until you're done.
Exactly. Like that Epic's latest hit, Fortnite, at best moments it gets fairly fast action - but after dying there is absolutely ridiculously long waiting time to get back to action. Pretty much same in other titles. In arena shooters it was *oops, dead*, and 1 second later you are back running and shooting, fragging maybe someone the next second. It creates intensity in the gameplay I sorely miss.
@@cupriferouscatalyst3708 seriously, people who play solo br without a squad are miserable. So much dead time between gun fights, without the boys there's no point sitting through all that
@@cupriferouscatalyst3708 I've not kept up with the genre so I'm not sure how this holds up, but it used to be that ~50% of players played BR's like it was more of an arena shooter. They'd all parachute into the same central area and within a minute or two most of them would be dead and gone. There's an argument to be made that despite the popularity of battle royale shooters, most of their playerbase don't actually want to play them.
Man, I can remember playing Unreal Tournament back in high school. Our computer sciences teacher was a dedicated gamer, and he had a hidden file on his computer with UT in it. After school, a group of six or eight of us, including the ComSci teacher, would head to the computer lab and play UT, Quake, or 007 for a couple hours. UT was definitely my favorite, and I spent hours between 2001 and 2003 playing it with my friends at the school. That first year after I graduated, I'd still go back and play from time to time. I miss it
Something I thought was important to bring up is that Splitgates popularity was seemingly influenced pretty hard by Halo infinite's hype cycle, and that at least my friend group played it as a temporary Halo 6.
False people who don't even like halo or ever even played it played splitgate it blew up fora while just couldn't substane all the success because the team of only 4 people was to small they had to rapidly start expanding then they got funded Like 10 million dollars and caned support to make a game the fans deserved from the start stay tuned 1043 games isn't done yet.
@@sluttyboy69 Because a few people who never played or don't like Halo played Splitgate, that somehow makes Splitgate less like Halo? Smooth brain logic right here. The game is nearly identical to Halo 4 but with an added gimmick of portals. If you honestly can't see that, you must not have eyes at all.
I think something that really didnt help the genre was the dropping of single player. older arena shooters had single player modes/campaigns that, although basically just botmatches, allowed players to familiarise themselves with levels/modes/mechanics.
All UT games had a single-player campaign, maybe it wasn't so much a reasonable thing with Q3A because the bots weren't nearly as good as UT'99's. I have only really played UT with bots.
I'm not sure that was what did it, especially since we know that multiplayer-only games can be quite successful. The variable of industry scope has to be taken into account moreso, I think. UT'99 sold about 100 000 copies in its first year and that was considered really successful. Titanfall 2, by comparison, was considered a failure for EA at 4 million sales in 3 months. Budgets are much bigger, development time is much longer and more expensive. A game like UT simply can't be made successfully in today's market. It might do 100 000 sales in its first year, but that won't be a success. The gaming market is so much larger than it was.
@@n00b1f13d That and sadly, the genre has little to innovate. UT2004 is still peak mechanical gameplay in shooters and it still plays exceptionally well today. We have already seen everything the genre can do and is: a cemented name in gaming history. And game quality even with budgets getting bigger, is declining. Valorant for example, is a trash game, it tries to live under the shadow of CSGO with artificial dopamine stimulating gameplay with powerups and colorful, unintelegible stuff, and people like it.
The arena shooters were a lot more fun when you could go to a particular server that was operated by a particular clan or individual in the community. They would have a huge variety of maps and mods loaded that would always offer something new. Not the same tired map rotation over and over again that would be provided on one of the public servers. I remember playing Unreal4Ever mod with all sorts of wacky weapons (shrink rays, exploding nuke dolls for example) with a huge variety of maps and just having a LOT of fun.
Private servers, lack of monetisation, and moddability are indeed what made these games popular and are why every new attempt at doing them fails, and will keep failing until we get out of this excessive control & monetisation phase the gaming world seems to be in.
Unreal 2004 had some awesome mods. There was a wave based alien mod with the hilarious setting of your character being the size of a small mouse in a bedroom fighting aliens. A mode I loved and have yet to really see again is the assault defend mode. Similar to battlefield 2142 and far more advanced in concept than rush in following battlefield titles. Complete a varying set of objectives to destroy an enemy teams generator. It's the glue you need to take today's non existent team work in games and revive some meaningful semblance.
This is my biggest beef with modern gaming. Most of my fun back-in-the-day was finding servers with people I liked, making friendships, and waiting every day for the chance to get home and hop on with my friends. Today's temporary lobby setup forcing people to disband and go into a matchmaking que every time makes a game feel sterile and lonely. After a while you become familiar with the game but not its community and you get bored.
For me a lot of it comes down to the ability to play *against* the same people repeatedly. Nowadays you only ever get to play on the same side as people you know. It really ruins the experience and social dynamic to only ever play on the same team as your friends.
Yeah in order for arena shooters to make a comeback and again there IS a demand for them, is to put LOADS of emphasis on private servers which is how online games should be played anyway. Matchmakers are cancer and suited only for the "ranked" mode which in turn shouldnt even exist in the first place.
Arena shooters was the peak of gaming. You enter the game, shoot some strangers, they shoot you back - basically 0 downtime, you respawn instantly. No bullshit microtransactions, skins, battle pass, Lilith with AK47. Competetive, but not "sweaty" and toxic. Pure fun
About 15 years ago, I managed to convince the IT Technician to hide Quake 3 on the schools servers for year 10/11 students (my year), so we could play it on lunchbreaks, LAN games across a school was something to see.
Unreal Tournament 1999 will always hold a special place in my heart and will always be my favourite game. My sister and i grew up playing it, not necessarily together all the time, but a lot, nonetheless. We would watch dad play it a lot and I got into it from a young age, though at that age not very fond of the gore, I loved the game regardless and I still do. When UT4 came out years later, I introduced my partner to the game and we would play for hours, I taught him everything I knew about the game, from strafing, to shock rifle combos to capture the flag. We had so much fun, and we got our other friends to play with us. It was the closest we'd ever get to playing unreal tournament together. We play splitgate occasionally now, but the game is just dominated by bots and there aren't that many maps either. It is still fun to play with friends and the portal mechanic is really fun, yet can be hard to get used to. The music from Unreal Tournament has always been my comfort soundtrack. I owe a lot to that game.
@@psychosomatiqueofficial That means nothing, the OldUnreal patches for Unreal have long added redundant master servers, and OldUnreal's 469 patch for UT99 does the same. There's also replacement master servers for UT3 and UT2004, as well. The fanbase will keep these games up and running, even if Epic refuses to even acknowledge their legacy.
I graduated HS in the early 2000's - my senior year I took a vocational Cisco networking class. The class was new so it wasn't really fleshed out too well and for a few weeks we didn't have the networking hardware to carry on with our lesson so we just turned the computer lab into a LAN and played Q3, UT and HL Op4 for weeks. I miss that class.
I learned all about IP/SPX/NetBIOS and whatnot from LAN Parties back in the days of DOS gaming. Got to load those TSRs and allocate memory in order to load NetBIOS. Gaming is a practical vocation. :)
I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal show that arena shooters could have a chance. Multiplayer will still be incredibly difficult to pull off while maintaining that classic Arena shooter style, but Doom''s campaigns have astounding gameplay that I feel a game like Unreal Tournament could take notes from. I don't know what to do about multiplayer, but you could absolutely take Doom'16/Eternal's gameplay style and roll with it into Unreal Tournament to some degree while building a cool new story with all of the characters, lore and whatnot into it.
Doom Eternal's problem was nixing the multiplayer from 2016. Nothing against Battlemode- not my cup of tea, but applause to Bethesda for trying something new and putting effort into the level design. The game would've benefitted from having more options for those of us who didn't enjoy it.
I didn’t grow up on arena shooters, and basically the first one i played was splitgate. It instantly hooked me, and no other game has come close to the pure fun of splitgates gameplay. I find myself experimenting and finding new insane stunts and killing methods all the time, and thats probably why i still play it semi regularly, largely depending on if ive got someone to play with
One thing I'll say is it's never too late to get into them. I got into the arena shooter genre in 2014, long after it stopped being mainstream. I didn't grow up with these games at all... yet, I committed. I found people to play with, and I ended up falling in love with the genre so much through my experiences that these games are what I think of when it comes to shooters. Quake 3 Arena ended up becoming possibly my favorite shooter at all time yet all my gameplay experiences of it were in 2014-2016 long after it was dead. I've had some crazy duel matches. I've experimented with all the weapons, developed map strategies, have pulled off "sick combos". I've hosted gaming events and we would have people spectate over duels. We've done CTF. I was able to do some crazy shit in Quake 3 man... I played the game in competitive settings which made the game crazy fast. I'd fly and chase after players aggressively, curving around corners. Using the lightning gun (a beam based weapon with high knockback) to push players back as I move after them and then launching them back in the air with rockets every time I'd get them in a spot where I could hit them. I evolved into this kind of "Quake god" despite being like, 15 years late to the party. Point is, I'd really recommend looking for a way to get into the genre if it seems like it's something that's your cup of tea. Don't let the "oldness" or "unpopularity" of the genre deter you from playing. Some of these are _really_ good games with really interesting weapon mechanics, movement mechanics, strategy, and level design. The games might be dead in their actual player count but if you find people you can play with and drag into these games and get something going... more than worth it imo.
That's a shame. I only ever played the Bungie Halo's when they were relevant and it was a great time for Arena gaming, let me tell you. The lan party's on custom forge maps/gamemodes with non-stop action gaming is still to this day, for me, unmatched by any other game. Splitgate is however a pretty good game by today's standards.
I liked them because you could, just on a whim, load the game, connect to a deathmatch server with the lowest ping, and play a couple 10-15 minute games. Newer online FPS games seem much longer, slow-paced,/tactical, and depend on high team cohesion (which isn't really possible unless you coordinate your game time with your friends).
Totally. And this is a strange thing because you'd think "more team cohesion" would be better only for lan parties and split screen, which are also things of the past
Yep, old COD was like that but these days it's so slow and everyone takes games so seriously now. Early 2000s people just played for fun, now it's life and death
Newer games are also often a lot more mental engagement too. Back in Unreal Tournament 2K4 days, I remember being able to just fall into a rhythm while bs'ing with complete strangers.
Unreal Tournament is what got me into game development. We would make skins on Paint Shop Pro, maps on Unrealed, the music was awesome, the multiplayer mode was awesome, the maps were out of this world... and all that on my Pentium II 300 Mhz with 64 mb of RAM and a 16 mb graphics card with 3dfx. Man, we had the time of our life.
Indeed it was, the ability to create your own content was what kept me going in those games for so long, I used to run my own UT2004 servers with my own custom content until games like the at the time new World Of Warcraft pulled the attention of me and my friends away. After that new games using the FPS mechanic but featuring good stories to play along to became the norm.
When I was 11 I used to make doom/hexen mods, I've done half life maps and then unreal tournament maps. That led me to programming too! Unreal weapon mechanics were magic, I still remember Frigate and Facing worlds layouts I used to play with friends for hours, good times :')
A large skill gap is an issue for arena shooters too. I tried getting into Reflex, but the lobbies were often reduced to 1v1s and I would get my ass handed to me every time. Often difficult to find players of similar skill to grow with, while being destroyed constantly just drives people away. This paired with lack of meaningful feature innovation probably killed off the genre.
Skill gap exist in every game. But in fast paced arena shooters is crucial. You just cant rat there. You have to move, frag, defend position, time, cover teammates, etc.. If your team rat than it loose for sure. When I was young I been also destroyed many times badly, but I made it to some certain level and succeed in some tournaments with my team. Todays young want everything for free and now. And developers listen to it and gave tham aim assist. With that they choose rather BR styles games where they can rat and AI when killed someone with AA give tham that dopanim satisfaction that they couldnt archive in old school gengre.
@@marian0321 I agree that many skill gap complaints are from people who didn't take enough time to actually practice the skills necessary to keep up, but I also see nothing wrong with rank/stat based matchmaking. I think there's nothing wrong with including features in games that help players develop the necessary skills to close that skill gap a bit to compete online, maybe incentivize high rank players with better rewards if they use handicaps when they face lower rank players, that way new players might last longer and veterans can learn to do more with less. I personally never have issues figuring out multiplayer games, I always learn by watching or befriending skilled players.
you have to be able to learn the game in order to play the game. Arena shooters and fighting games are both awful for it, and the community is super toxic, too - the peak "reward" for being "good" at the game is being able to stomp people who aren't. Then the community, which insists on a nearly vertical learning curve, gets mad when their religion isn't practiced by the gaming community as a whole and the entire thing self-destructs because you can't sustain a development cycle for Quake Champions based on the die-hard 1%ers that want to run everything for themselves. Same's true for Mobas, but say what you want about league's matchmaking, it at least lets the community grow.
I remember being just awful when I started. Basically what I did then is crank the bot difficulty to Godlike in Unreal Tournament and played game after game after game until I started to win and then I was one of the best among my friends at the time. That skill gap was there when just about all of us started and we had to adjust because honestly there wasn't much else to play at the time so it was get better or just not play.
Blame PUBG, they did it first. Fortnite just stole their idea and made it even more mainstream via console release, kid appealing cartoon graphics and free to play.
@@jimmypeeps8471 Epic developers abandoned Unreal Tournament 4 and switched to Fortnite when Fortnite blew up like it did. That is why we blame Fortnite and not PUBG. Fortnite killed the UT4 development.
I was at precisely the right age for Quake to become my first gaming love - the baseline upon which I compare all that followed. The hours I spent exploring that game's weird, surreal worlds feel like they are written into my soul, and the mods - oh my gosh, the mods - encouraged me to get into coding and mapping. When the demo for Unreal Tournament arrived in September 1999 I was right there in the download queue. The visuals, the frantic energy, the bright colours and the mindblowing soundtrack - aw hell. I didn't think it could get any better. To be honest, I still don't. When I think 'FPS' I think rocket launchers, fiends, shamblers, super nailguns and eldritch nightmare labyrinths; I think flak cannons, shock rifles and miniguns, spaceships and green slime. They were the worlds I escaped into when everything around me seemed insurmountable. They gave me space to think, and an excuse to stop thinking when that became too much. I found my adult self there, in those gloomy netherworld catacombs and grimy steel complexes, and when I emerged, it already felt like the genre's Golden Days were beginning to pass. It's strange - I just can't muster the same love for anything that followed. There is something about that era - the raw, simplistic, often highly abstract or surrealist environments that broadly communicate what they are trying to represent but which have a particular utilitarian and dreamlike sparseness to them - that gives it a low-distraction flow perfect for intense multiplayer. Even just with the addition of Static Meshes and 'busier' maps in the UT sequels, it felt like something pure and raw had been lost in the visual noise. Counter-Strike, while not an arena shooter, retained a measure of that raw, barebones low-distraction environmental simplicity; it was already starting to feel like a throwback by the time it had reached its first 'full' version, and that was oddly comforting. It also had immense longevity. Meanwhile, the next generation of arena shooters grew and iterated with new game modes and ever greater graphical fidelity, but their long-term staying power always seemed to be somehow lacking. Too busy; too easy to get lost in the noise. I can go back and play UT for days; I get bored of most new arena shooters within hours.
Well said. I think nowadays the focus is on graphics, but not the overall design and atmosphere. Many new games look like a copy of another. That, and overall map design is not as creative as in the past. It's either corridor shooting or somewhat open, but flat maps with no verticality.
I was born after UT99 released. In 2015 my parents sent me to a coding summer camp being held at some college upstate... the computer lab they gave us was filled with these Windows XP machines that could barely run Roblox. But they DID have a bunch of older games installed - the original Halo CE, and most importantly UT99. That week was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Imagine a bunch of middle-school aged kids in a computer lab having a UT99 LAN party despite none of them even previously knowing what an "arena shooter" was, years after the genre had died off commercially. It was awesome :)
I feel the same way, but it was DOOM for me. I walked around elementary school with a thick book called "Tricks of the DOOM Gurus", read it like a bible
No offense but I’m 26 so I never played unreal tournament. just base off looking at clips it looks so repetitive and predictable I would rather play OW, CSGO, Apex tbh.
I have awesome memories of some lans on rankin/deck/idoma and the instagib ctf with that chill UT.ogg; I enjoyed ChaosUT2e mod for UT2k4 as well. I accept that it's dead, but at the time it was smth that had me gripped like nothing else, so I'm grateful I got to experience that as a child.
@@MalikATL It definitely was very repetitive, but not very predictable. A lot of the enjoyment was also about the people you played with, and that game was like church for us. There was a very high skill ceiling and no SBMM, with the movement mechanics, map knowledge and control and predicting opponents, especially on 1v1 games. I was never a great player, I remember one night playing a 1v1 ladder with a buddy who killed me 20 to 0, then I specced him playing another friend who in turn killed him 20-0. I immediately asked that guy to 1v1 me and jump on voice and give me some pointers to improve my gameplay. Not to say skill isn't a huge factor in modern games, but it's not as extreme and you don't see such a wide skill gap anymore. There was no RNG in any form, which made it more about personal skill than luck. Also there was an extremely active modding and map making community, more than many games that are lauded for their mod support like skyrim, and many community servers had literally hundreds of high-quality maps in rotation, with voting enabled at end-of-round which kept it super fresh.
@@swishpronoob I have no idea I was just playing with bots for a few hours one evening. Epic took down the master server a while ago, along with all unreal tournament games from store pages, so you'd have to find an IP address from a community website to join an online game now I think.
UT3 killed UT. Despite graphics, UT3 was a significant departure from UT2004. Although there was some improvement with game modes, the maps weren’t as good and movement felt kinda sluggish.
@@3rdHalf1 Epic was developing new UT and it was playable as open alpha but the development was halted indefinitely when Fortnite started printing money and eventually got cancelled completely. I personally loved UT3.
Lack of bot support is what killed the genre, Quake 3, ut99/2004/3 all had great fun bots that meant that anyone could learn and enjoy the game in thier own safe way before jumping into multiplayer where the skill gap can be insurmountably huge. A robust singleplayer experience is important for these kind of games.
I think the killer of the Arena Shooter is over saturation and expectation. It feels like there's so much available now that there's not much that keeps you to one game anymore. The last Arena Shooter I enjoyed (before it died) was Tribes Ascend. There was a skill to be learnt in playing the different weight classes and learning to skate around the map using your momentum to its peak was fantastic once you got into it.
I think that was among the first PC games I played after getting my first computer. Definitely a very cool game. Too bad there haven't been more takes on that skiing movement/map design.
Same with MMO's first couple way back when done different things, how many generic survival games do we have now? they're all the same thing with different pictures, over saturation, was like this back when the transition was being made from arcade machines where the onus was on putting coins in the slot over and over again to make money, all the first consoles ( I mean like old atari's) started to churn out the same games with slightly different sprites and packaging and were expecting players to buy loads of cartridges a week, that's where we are again and the actual gameplay hasn't evolved all that much, selling people character customisations is the primary focus of a lot of online games these days unfortunately, these were things you used to unlock playing the game.
Oh man Tribes.. One of my fondest memories was my Dad letting me play Tribes Vengeance on his PC as a child. It was my first taste of video games, and needless to say I got HOOKED. The satisfaction of sniping a light armor dude going warp speed, carrying your flag, with a spinfuser *chefs kiss*
I'm so happy I was able to experience this part of gaming at its peak. Unreal Tournament 99, 2003, 2004, Quake 3 Arena etc - It was a special time and there were so many custom maps and mods. We even had Parkour maps in Unreal Tournament 99 called bunny trax. It was such a cool time in gaming. And that isn't to say games today aren't entertaining, they most certainly are.
Online gaming from 1996 to about 2009-ish was _the_ shit. Controls were still simple(in most games), private servers, mods, no random lobbies, nobody cared if you swore, hardly any DLCs, p2w or microtransactions...
My sister was the one that got me into shooters, I was a JRPG guy before then. We played so much Unreal Tournament back in the day, it's not even funny. And when UT 03/04 came out, we just couldn't get into it as much as we did back then, and we both had moved on to other things. I went into the military shooters CoD and Battlefield like Level did, as well as horror. She went into the more things like Hitman/Manhunt or sandbox style like GTA and Mafia. But we did have a lot of fun.
I think the level of entry and skill-ceiling in an arena shooter is very high. It makes it hard for newcomers. The only people who are playing the genre these days are highly skilled veterans. I have seen it firsthand when new players try to play but have no chance to learn. I was new at one point but when I entered the genre, I was fortunate to have many others in my same position. I then learned from what high-skilled players did that was correct, added it to my own skills, and grew from there. New players get smashed and then run out of the server if they perform too badly. It sucks.
I find it the opposite. I played UT99 a lot at that time. I try to play PubG and die with no kills and there's so much wait time, it gets annoying. So I tried Quake Champions and with the quick respawn its easier to move and get some kills.
Awesome video. Made me very nostalgic for the old days of UT99, CS1.6, TFC, etc. Definitely spent a ton of time with movement on TFC with rocket jumps on soldier, tons of maps doing concussion grenade jump practice with scout and medic. So many awesome memories, thanks for the vid!
I'd argue that the FPS genre gave way to *simpler* concepts, not bigger ones. Slow movement, hitscan weapons - these things are not complicated. Anyone can cotton on to the core mechanics pretty quickly. But Unreal Tournament 2004, for example - you have high jumping, double jumping, dodging, dodge jumping, wall dodging, rocket jumping, lift jumping, jumppads, jump boots... About a dozen weapons that can be carried simultaneously, all with alt-fire modes... Several powerup types distributed around each map... Numerous gametypes, some with vehicles... Dozens of hugely different maps loaded with sci-fi concepts... What results is a much more complex core dynamic in which you have a lot more to learn, and utilise a lot more skill to master. Combat isn't a split-second react-first-to-win, it's a joust in which you dodge each other's projectiles or strafe around each other's hitscan until you've whittled the other player down to 0. So what hurts these games' popularity is that they have a much higher entry bar. They represent a higher point in a gamer's evolution that most don't put the time or grey matter in to get to - many UT players don't even realise you can dodge, which is the core gameplay mechanic. So what's really needed is to take these concepts into singleplayer, where players can learn these concepts in an easier environment tailored to helping them learn. Doom 2016 and Eternal did this excellently, and consequently have become some of the most iconic games of recent years. Unreal Tournament's biggest mistake was dropping the singleplayer-focused Unreal games that they were based on. Introduced the core of the game in singleplayer, then build a multiplayer focused game based on that, and you have a fully schooled playerbase ready to go.
Agreed. Modern shooters are wider, but not deeper. They’re made easier to play to attract more people to visit their microtransaction store, and have reduced skill ceilings so the casual masses don’t get scarred away from spending time in the game and looking at that microtransaction store even more.
@@Storm_. I remember that era and thinking one problem I had was that FPS games didn't feature on consoles with controllers that worked for my hands (I wish the XBox Series or PS5 controller layouts had been a thing in those generations just for all the button placement and geography things). But I think the Borderlands games show how some of the core concepts can be done right without a straight up competitive mode.
Entry bar was never the problem. Shooters like CSGO and Valorant, or MOBAS like LOL or DOTA, require you to know lots of hard knowledge to perform decently, and the game tell you none of it, yet they're very popular The real thing arena shooters need is marketing, E-sports, and new games. Currently the latest big arena shooter is Quake Champion and it's been dead since 2017, no shit the genre ain't pulling players
I feel like arena shooters will come back when the time is right. Like myself, there's OGs out there who miss the good ole days of arena shooters. All it takes is one company to innovate on the concept. With the amount of creative minds out there, I'm sure they'll make a comeback because the BRs just don't do it for me. I maintain some of the best memories I've ever had when Unreal Tournament was just a game mode in the original Unreal.
I been saying this for years. Everything is cyclic in nature. Style. Fashion. Fads. Arena FPS will absolutely come back and be mainstream, it’s just not the right time. I predict 10 years it’ll make a comeback.
How about VR? Not now, I believe if you make a VR arena shooter, players would just throw up :). But in the future. Just imagine: this insane game speed and movement with full immersion
I don't think so, these games need a proper LAN mode, everything us under clients and you are constantly trying to fix some problems which are related to activations, serial keys, always online DRMs and such shits and DRM free games from GOG mostly don't have working multiplayer at all. Return of Arena shooters needs mainly return of classic gaming model without annoying clients. Do you remember how long time it took to return back to game when it crashed in the past? It was a few seconds!!!! You were back literally in 30 seconds, but today, because of all those clients and unskipaple intros and Intel/nvidia logos, you don't have to even go back to game because game already ended. 🙂 Classic multiplayer experience just died with online clients.
Yeah, I think there's a lot that could be done with the genre's spirit, but too many have been essentially carbon copies of quake or ut. I think the issue is less about having an arena game "go big" and more about keeping a higher than usual player retention by continuing to hammer on features not present in bigger titles. I think clever designs on social features and community interactions are needed (randomly, user playstyle, or regionally assigned stat tracking factions, rival system, longform/meta series of matches and matchmaking (winning a best of series across a week to influence a future map release, for example). A good bot system is probably also being neglected, AI assisted content generation (maps), and adding collab emphasis on user content is probably going to be key innovations in the next decade.
I was introduced to arena shooters in 2016 coming from CSGO and I really fell in love with it. It felt like the highest display of skill in a video game, and dueling felt like a chess game, where brains would always be the most important aspect. However, learning how to play arena shooters (movement, mechanics, learning how to duel) was the most difficult part to achieve and understand, and I think it's why it fell off in the modern era. Spending time just to focus and learn how to even stand a chance in a duel is a process not many would want to go through when there are a lot easier games to get into now. Learning arena shooters took me a hundred hours of just getting destroyed to learn anything lol
It super doesn't take 100 hours, though. Like, if I play Counter-Strike, I survive for all of 20 seconds per round as I die horribly because my pinky finger was visible through a sewer grate I didn't know about. Quake Champions? Diabotical? Strafe jumping took *maybe* an hour to basically figure out and casual game modes without item timers were an easy way to get used to maps before playing duels where map knowledge actually matters. You can't get bullied *too* hard because you sort of just zoom around everywhere.
Dueling was never the most popular part of arena shooters by a long shot anyway. It was my favorite genre and I almost exclusively played team games especially CTF.
@@colbyboucher6391 You severely underestimate my stupidity and laziness. Would the average gamer dedicate a whole hour to learning how to strafe jump, you think? Arena shooters have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. That's a turnoff for most casuals.
I was about to write a post on this but you already touched the subject matter. Arena games required complete control both physically (a decent mouse was a must-have, a good sharp monitor, good Ping), technically (some white-hat modding, etc.) and of course high level of skill was necessary (no upgrades, no cheap cuts, no in-game purchases for better weapons). The entry point to play on satisfactory level was... I'm sorry to say but unachievable on consoles at the time, and it completely cut that market off. To be honest, I do have a level of despise to modern "story mode" assisted shooters with pre-scripted cut-offs. I can't see them as true skill-based experiences.
Sadly I only got to play Lawbreakers in the beta because my PC died the year it was released. However... those weeks of playing were some of the funnest times I ever had playing a modern shooting game. I don't really consider myself a "shooter guy" anymore but for me, when I do play a shooter, these are the games that I think of when it comes to the genre. If Lawbreakers was still around, even if the game was _dead_ but still playable, I _would_ go out of my way to hop on it because the game was just that awesome. I've done the same with Quake, Unreal, etc. I honestly can't get behind modern shooting games. They just aren't "shooters" to me. They focus more on other gimmicks. Co-op "looter shooters", "extraction shooters", military shooters, class-based "hero shooters". It's like, you can't just have a game with interesting weapon mechanics, movement, and level design. Instead it has to be a military simulation game where you have to realistic "bullet weapons" that all function the same and the actual combat takes only like a quarter of a second. Or it has to be a game with "abilities" where the combat itself is really a non-factor and its just what character picks you have on your team. It's weird because I didn't even "grow up" with the arena shooter genre and I had such a late exposure to it, but I can't stand these modern types of shooters. Games with ADS or quick kill times or slow bullet spongey combat. For me I'll always be an arena shooter guy through and through.
All thanks to cliff bleszinski and possibly the worst marketing campain of all time when it comes to games When he wasnt making enemies of every gaming sub culture on the planet the marketing was making sure nobody would play it anyway by basically being "modern games suck but our game is not like other girls"
It was wonderful, but IMO the downfall of Tribes in general vs. others was the absurd reliance on midairs. Pretty much no one ever died because something like an actual fight couldn't even happen until you'd played for at least, like, 30 hours.
@@colbyboucher6391 the fact that you had to play 100hrs to get a weapon or a new class? that was the problem, not the flying thing. ALSO, semi-hitscan weapons were in the shop and not as simple to get them.
@@colbyboucher6391 not the fact that there were grenade launchers? kunais? slow proj weapons? there were hitscan weapons. Flying was to satisfying and was the core of the game. if you had no fun cos you were not able to kill anybody... it's up to you, skill gap ngl
@@saveborg1091 What I'm saying is that the vast, VAST majority of people had no fun because they couldn't kill anyone, yes. Like I said, the skill gap was so high that very few people in most matches ever got more than one or two kills. Quake Live is one of my favorite games of all time but Tribes was on a whole other level.
@@bobdylan1968 dellusional! HI sucks a bag of moldy dikks.... the story is ass and the MP is a turd....343 are completely incompetent and anyone who supports em is an idiot.... no slayer out of the box? that's base multiplayer! and they couldn;t even implement that? balanced my ass!! GTFO!
I was addicted to Split gate when it came out. The only issue after a couple months was at that point people were getting so good that I couldn't keep up. I didn't have the time being in my upper 30s with kids to commit myself to trying to stay competitive. If I was younger I would've probably stayed into a lot more competitive gaming. I still do competitive gaming but not super serious, it's more just about playing with my friends online than to get a win.
Kinda my issue with modern competitive gaming... People do it as a career now. Fine and all but I'm not looking for that and I don't wanna have to train like an Olympiad just to compete at something that used to just be a fun little hobby. Kinda feels like wanting to play a casual sport in the park with your friends but finding yourself on a professional pitch. Maybe I need to git gud... I just feel like I didn't have to play for every waking hour of the day to be gud a decade ago.
I believe the death of arena shooters can be traced to these trends: 1. More cinematic/story driven shooters - Half-Life 2. More console friendly shooter design/regen health - Halo 3. Realistic/Military shooters - COD/Counter Strike 4. Hero shooters - Overwatch 5. Battle royales - Fortnite
I loved one arena shooter as a child, and it was Unreal Tournament. At that age the dark and doom-y corridors of Quake spooked me, so I enjoyed the brighter colors and lighter hallways of Unreal Tournament. I played pretty much every mainline PC game up until Unreal Tournament 3. Nowadays, I still revisit the old UT games, but for online play, Quake Champions. I made it full circle :)
I grew up slightly ahead of the arena shooter days, starting from UT2004. Probably still an all time favorite for me given it was my first fps on my first computer (not counting having played quake/doom/wolfenstein on my dads computer as a child). I got really hooked into the scene of competitive quake starting around the end of quake 4 going into quakelive which carried on to be my #1 fav game that I played for nearly 10 straight years. I immediately recognized the instagib ctf map I’d play all the time in unreal tournament from your video pic and knew exactly what this was going to be about. Thanks for stepping some of us older folks back down memory lane. I still attend quakecon every year with my wife!
Lawbreakers is to this day one of the most fun shooters I have ever played. The movement mechanics were perfect and the weapon and character variety made it so fun to replay. It's criminal that it didn't survive the way it ought to have
i agree, the game was amazing, movement , gunplay , map design .. crazy high skill ceiling .. everything i wished for i managed to clock 300 hours before it died after like 2 month ..
Yeah lawbreakers had some great ideas. The whip character was amazingly fun. I feel like it could have been an overwatch style game almost but its modes were kind of the letdown imo. That plus the $30 entry fee was too high for most gamers.
Thanks for the spotlight. I grew up with UT and UT2004 then moved onto Halo and nothing has ever really come close to the enjoyment I got out of arena shooters and LAN parties. I was hoping they might make a comeback but might be wishful thinking at this stage
Well, since Epic made the big-brain decision to strip UT from all digital stores... I suspect we may see a resurgence of UT99, once people start sharing it around on the sly. It still runs great, still looks great, still plays great... and it's a lot easier to set up a game with friends for that than any later title. And damn, the map list available now? I trawled through some of the best quality maps that have been made for the game in the past 20 years, and now my deathmatch list is 600+ entries long.
I'm hoping that when ID software eventually decides to make a proper Quake reboot they will revive the arena shooter genre in the right way. They are the only studio I believe that can do it.
honestly champions ins't bad. No idea what it was like at launch, but now its pretty close to what I wanted from a q3 followup (only downide is its special moves thing.. but that's not as big a deal)
@@billyj.causeyvideoguy7361 It is mid at best. The fact that the stats of the characters are different in terms of speed and health is just stupid and break the games core. Everyone should be on even playing fields, its up to their skill to gather armor, powerups, and weapons to dominate. Its very simple yes but its a beautiful flow, if it aint broke dont fix it. Q champions is ID trying to fix something that was never broken in the first place.
@@billyj.causeyvideoguy7361 I agree, still, the problem is that now seems a bit too late as sadly just a few hundred active players remain; hell, at this year's QuakeCon there wasn't even any real QC duel... things are starting to slip out
I miss Command and Conquer: Renegade multiplayer, one of the most chaotic and fun games I still ever played. Map control similar to Battlefield conquest with Arena style fighting in pockets around a large map with vehicles and attacking enemies bases to win the game. Was great honestly for a RTS in first person format.
i used to love playing commander on battlefield 2142 when i was too high to shoot. you could really control the battlefield and squads wanted to do what was asked and you could drop them all supplies etc. i could really lose myself in it. then you can zoom into the action too. great fun.
I miss Renegade's marathon servers. Some maps were balanced enough that I could play,log off, come back after work, and still be on the same game. Everyone did it back then, and the communities that grew up around those servers were amazing
I'm 22 so I didn't really play arena shooters back in their prime, but I have always enjoyed them, any fast paced movement shooter really. It's a shame that they don't do well nowadays, as they are by far the most fun imo. A fun Quake style arena shooter is Diabotical, very clean and polished, lots of fun.
I love Diabotical but the lack of bots to practice with and lack of players in general makes it a hard sell. I played it a lot before it died out and it truly felt like a perfected and more accessible version of Quake 3
I absolutely love movement shooters, titanfall and quake are some of my favourites, I'm still waiting for a decent game like those. Something that has lots of depth in its mechanics, a lot to learn overall that can keep me hooked for hours on end. I adored splitgate, it was a great challenge and offered that depth but everything is just dumbing down movement mechanics which simply makes them less enjoyable. Battlefield and cod being the biggest offenders.
Titanfall movement was great, sadly series got killed on favour of apex legends and apex had to remove a lot of titanfall mechanics Titanfall also had much lower skill ceiling, you did not need to exploit engine bugs (made feature) to stay competitive as new player
@@Aro666pl I suppose that’s true. Similar to battlefield there are ways to cheese the system and perform well (a wall / spitfire. Tone camping etc), but you could still excel in tap strafing if you want that edge
I certainly miss the days of the LAN and my obsession with level design at the time. Things were much simpler back in the days of compiling your .bsp . I hope someday we can see a comeback of the deathmatch, instagib and CTF style arena shooters. Hell, the years I spent working on my strafe jumps in Quake 3 on the trick jumping maps, good times...
The skill ceiling likely had a negative impact on this genre. This is a major shame, as being good at Quake and Unreal Tournament provides a rush you just don't get anywhere else. The gameplay of the classics in particular has aged like fine wine. The genre will never make a full return, but it will always have its die-hard fans and it makes me smile when I see studios trying to keep the format going.
It's a shame that LAN multiplayer is almost dead, used to be awesome bringing your rig and hanging out with a bunch of mates and having < 1 ms pings and just fragging for hours in dozens of different games. I used to play UT2004 for a while back in the day and UT3 as well as quake 2 and 3 and Counterstrike. Last year I played the heck out of splitgate for quite a while but haven't been much of a gamer since I have kids and I generally don't have time for games much, and when I do I am usually playing single player or something I can easily walk away from or pause
A friend of mine is still running a dedicated server for UT04. At LAN parties, which we still have occasionally, we always make a note to jump into UT04. I remember playing UT 1999 a TON when I was in middle school and high school. I would love a comeback but the reality is, we can still find games if we wanted to. We can message some friends an join a game anytime, a lot of us still do.
A couple years ago I loaded up Unreal Gold and was shocked there were still several servers running. Even found a few people playing that I’d played with 20yrs ago! Major flashback shock after not playing for so long…making me want to reinstall and check it it right now!
I started playing shooters in 1996 and my first MP shooter matches were around that time. To me it is mostly not about the game modes but about the movement and time to kill. So many games today feel slower and have very short TTKs while back in the day, with high speed and longer TTKs it felt like every kill was truly earned.
Modern fps games have such short TTKS so new/bad players can get a few kills by laying prone and hoping the next guy through the door is facing the wrong direction. Same with instakill explosives or easy to use sniper rifles in many new games.
The problem is twofold: 1. Gaming is no longer a "nerd hobby" The community just isn't there anymore. You used to be able to hop onto any game at any time and talk to everybody on your particular server like you'd known them forever. When voice communication came around, everybody had a microphone and it only got better. Now, the average gamer doesn't care about this. They care about the game as a game and nothing else, the social aspect isn't there unless it's with people that they already know. They just want to shoot bad guys, play the same simulated sports game that they buy every year, etc. 2. Corporatization of video games This rides off the last bit of the first point. The mainstreamification of video games has caused games to become catered towards the masses, not gamers. They're making games for the largest audience, because that's who they can sell the most copies of a game to. Arena shooters are not mainstream friendly and are definitely not corporate profit maximization friendly.
7:50 I disagree. Arena shooters are simple on the surface but there’s a lot more depth than at first glance you’re not mentioning at all. They’re far more intricate on a more competitive level than Call of Duty.
When Quake was released as a playable demo it completely changed gaming. It captivated me beyond any game I had seen previously. Then came Quake 2, Half Life, the mods like CTF and Rocket Arena. Set up LAN parties that became an annual event for a number of years until high speed internet became more common. Unreal Tournament playable demo with 3 maps and set to Instagib was by far the most played game on a few of those LAN parties.
to be fair halo infinites multiplayer got super stale because it launched less than half finished with less than a handful of maps and modes - people dropped it an never bothered to pick it back up. It also has major matchmaking issues for anyone not in the US (can't join games or d-sync) or anyone who's on either extremes of ranking (Unable to find games). It's currently in a downwards spiral where new playas can't join and old playas are getting board which drops the payer count and makes both issues worse.
I'm sure there'd be a market if done right. What I miss most from my Q3 days is the ability to play a quick round, everybody starts fresh, no matter how many hours or dollars somebody spent in the game, the only difference being skill. One can play a quick round or two and leave. Intense few minutes,. this seems unavailable today, now sessions last much longer and I often don't have the time nor do I wanna spend that much time on games in a row as is being demanded these days.
Thanks for making me feel old af. I think you pretty well nailed it. Arena shooters became stepping stone for more complex game design. As a more casual gamer today, ex hardcore gamer I think the speed and competition make it hard for people like me to enjoy.
I feel like the old Direct X9 graphics of UT2004 have a crisp simplicity to them that's lost to modern flashy graphics, and also has locked in solid movement and gun play mechanics on fun and interesting maps. Miss those days.
Great video and very relatable. I'm a Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal and later Quake 3 and UT99, UT2003 and UT2004 kid. Played some Counter-Strike (also at school lol) and later CoD in 2003, but I was totally hooked on Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Still the best shooter imo. I shifted more towards CoD in 2005 when CoD2 came out and got hooked on CoD4. Haven't played CoD3 at that time, because I was more of a PC Gamer back then. UT3 was indeed a very nice game, but had no players really fast. I also played the latest UT from Epic, Lawbreakers, Quake Champions, Toxikk, Splitgate and I liked all those games, but they had no player base or couldn't keep my interest that long. Last year I was more into Halo Infinite and lately I'm Valorant and continuous MW2. If Lawbreakers would come back, I would definitely play it. I would really like to see Treyarch or Infinity Ward give it a go with a game in the Halo Univserse. Maybe like hundreds of years after Master Chief or something like that.
I was introduced to FPP shooters genre with Heretic and Duke Nukem 3D but my first online arena shooter experience was Unreal Tournament - from day one as it was introduced in late 1999. All I needed to enter the world of death-dealing and flag-stealing was a Pentium II 233 with a Voodoo Graphics card and a 33.6K modem. It was wild! And guess what, the very same demo I used to play in 1999, installed from literally the same gaming magazine CD I got it from back then, still worked online up until January of 2023!
This is bullshit. Arena shooters are not just a stepping stone and they aren't outdated and arena shooters are still around most of them are unfortunately just single player games now but I still have hopes that someone will come around make a great multiplayer arena shooter again I love unreal tournament and I still play it to this day
I went from being a proper ut99 ctf player to a regular gaming Andy playing all sorts of trash. Talking about a step down bro . We are barely hanging on here … lets pray to the gaming gods that PoE2 is gonna be something. It is like going from pure Crystal meth to sniffing trashclan glue. 😅😅😅
Facing Worlds in UT with low grav playing CTF was so amazing. So many great memories, but I can remember how frustrating it was when someone would “beep” in and knock me off the internet lol.
Takes me back. I still recall getting a demo disc from a gaming magazine that had UT04 on it. played the hell out of it until a year later when I had my first job and got it. Hell, I recall the original steam with the tan background.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy to think about what Steam was like when it first launched versus what it eventually became. I don't believe there were even 3rd-party games on it for like the first 18-24 months it was around or something like that. It didn't even have a search feature until a couple years after that. Wild how the times change.
You touched on a lot of what I would have said as an explanation for why that particular style of FPS fell by the wayside. I've been playing FPS games on PC since Wolfenstein 3D came out, so I was fortunate to be right in the thick of it in terms of the rise and fall of the arena shooter. I have vivid memories of playing and watching others play Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Counterstrike (obviously not an arena shooter, but I'll get to that) throughout the latter half of my childhood. DOOM multiplayer was probably the progenitor for this style of FPS, although by the time I was a bit more aware of what was going on it had been supplanted by the aformentioned titles. If I had to offer a summary of what happened, it's that gaming changed A LOT from 1995-2005 both technologically as well as with the kind of games that were being made. Arena shooters were more or less a product of their time and what was possible with those earlier FPS engines, but players were looking for more as things started progressing and allowing for more intricate and (possibly arguably) fulfilling styles of gameplay. Half-Life and its various mods probably represent the flash point from which the next evolution in FPS games began. In terms of multiplayer, Counterstrike really redefined what was possible for the genre, even more so than base Half-Life; and here we are almost 25 years later, where the game has seen a number of rereleases and still has one of the most active communities in gaming. Arena shooters were a lot of fun, but I don't think they'll have a resurgence in any meaningful capacity. Outside of the non-Warzone COD games of the world and the odd TDM mode in any given game, simply running around and fragging people isn't really that satisfying for most people these days when they have so many other options for games that offer more substantial experiences. It's like giving a young person these days an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, or something from the pre-NES/Genesis era; they likely wouldn't "get it" because they didn't grow up with those games and in general they haven't held up by modern standards particularly well. They might play with them for a bit, but I expect they'd be looking for something else to do before long at all. And I can't really blame them for that, lol. Why play Combat or Archon (one of my favorites on the C64, for the record) when they can play the latest Mario or Zelda game? Bit of a tangent, but hopefully it made sense 😅
This argument would've held up if TDM wasn't the most popular gamemode in FPS games. Even now, every large BR game has a TDM mode because people like running around and fragging that much.
I wouldn't say so much it's the game modes, so much as the skill gap problem. The big advantage that more grounded games like CS or CoD have over arena shooters is that anyone can get some lucky shots and get a kill. Play some CoD and even if you're awful you'll at least get some kills. In an Arena shooter you'll just get smoked, because keeping up with the fast paced gameplay becomes almost entirely a matter of who has the best game mechanics. You have no real options in an arena shooter where as in CoD, if the other guy has better reflexes you can try camping, or hiding in corners, laying prone and surprising him, etc. And that can get you some cheap kills. But with Arena shooters there's no good counter to that. Even some of the modern games that take from arena shooters, like overwatch, have things like auto aim turrets that help weaker mechanical players handle people with lightning fast movement skills, so there's some ways to deal with mechanically being outclassed. In a game like Quake, you're pretty much screwed because the "bounce around like a frog on crack" playstyle has no counterplay beyond just being better at it than the other guy.
@@taragnor well said. However I think the rabbit hole goes deeper. I think it also has to do with the rise of eSports and marketability of the game via competitive play. While arena shooters will make great eSports games, they lack the marketability due to the factor you mentioned.
@@spinyslasher6586 Yeah esports is tricky. You need something with enough skill to be interesting to watch, to let pro players show off their skills, but also with enough mainstream appeal that it can generate a casual playerbase such that the game makes a name for itself. In the case of some hardcore games like Starcraft 2, there was a really good single player campaign which could draw in casual players. And really even in spite of that Starcraft was largely replaced by more mainstream games like League of Legends. But as an e-sport I feel like if you don't have at least a little mainstream appeal, it's hard to get any kind of esports traction in the long term, because the game always just ends up as an elitist game for pros only. And it's much harder to connect with a game as an e-sport if you haven't played it yourself at least in some capacity. The most successful e-sports aren't necessarily the most high skill games, but they tend to be ones with a lot of casual appeal. I think this is another area Arena shooters kind of dropped the ball. You don't really see many of them try to go for single player appeal at all. Unlike Doom or original Quake which had whole single player campaigns you could play, but as arena shooters seemed to develop, less and less effort was put into the single player game, and they became multiplayer only (sometimes with bots for offline play). And really if they go that route, they need to either be flexible on the skill-gap issue, like how Overwatch has a bunch of low-skill abilities like auto aim turrets, or they end up rapidly failing to get traction like Quake Champions.
@@taragnor I think the big appeal for Overwatch and other hero-based games are those ultimate abilities. While a pro-player can use these abilities at their highest potential, it allows casual players to look forward to something that can basically be a 'free kill' button.
I agree with the sentiment of skill ceiling issues. The last thing as a dev that you want is to make your new players feel alienated like they need to study a master's degree in your game before they can even remotely stand a chance in the game. Back in the 90s due to the fact that getting games was more difficult it meant that people wanted to squeeze as much enjoyment out of a game as possible and had time to learn. But in our modern Era like... if I'm not having fun in one game literally nothing is stopping me from opening another game. Hence why some more high skill ceiling games like Titanfall 2 is now almost dead with a small player base. Nothing stopped those players from just playing a different game if they didn't want to spend hours learning grapple hook tech on each map just to have a chance at having an even match. Some of course do. But not everyone. It's why even fighting games are losing popularity. An inability to draw in new audiences without the hard-core fan base who took that master's degree getting upset at them losing their advantage.
Yes. These games suck, because of the veterans, the full of egoist toxic moron competitive factor killed the genre. I see this in Quake Champion too. Pro players smurfing TDM, killing the fresh players. In real, no one want to fuk with 'pros', some players want to get fun after work in casual, and in the same skill lvl. They must rework the whole system, and give a skill based lobby, or separate the veteran shit from the casuals, because atm cannot get players. Its boring to get a match every 10min, where 4 man dominate the arena 75/25. There are much better games out there, where the player can have fun.
I'm 36, I played the arena shooter at it's peak. It was amazing. Today, every time I get on something that fast pace, I become shat on with a quickness. I simply don't have the speed and dexterity. No matter how good you think you are, there's a 14 in Singapore that will beat you every time. Despite loving these games in my youth, today I get destroyed my 7 year olds. For me SBMM would have to be strong for me to ever get back into this genre.
I'm the same age. Tested my reaction times a decade ago and they were 200 ms. Now they are 300 ms. Everything that happens, happens to me a whole tenth of a second faster than it ought to.
@@issaramzi. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be. New Zealand internet was pretty shoddy in the early 2000's, only one computer in our family could have it at a time, and I spent a lot of time playing multiplayer maps by myself imagining what it would be like playing them with other people.
@@ingolifs Dude that's not normal at all, you should get yourself checked. You are 36 not 63. Reaction time does barely change with age. I just did a quick test and scored 170 ms. I remember it used to be around 190 ms years ago but the improvement can be explained by lower latency hardware. Same age btw.
I think a games popularity these days is sadly influenced to much by big streamers,, when shroud, drdisrespect, summit etc try a game the numbers jump massively when they stop the numbers drop. Also the fact that the majority of FPS gamers think shroud is the FPS god and they see he is absolute trash and gets farmed in arena shooters puts players off. Quake for example is too hard for most players and compare that to games like CoD, Battlefield, overwatch where it is easy to be top of the leader board they would rather choose those, simply because they don't have to put the work in to get results. Quake if you don't grind and get good you are perma dead on spawn, even if the skill gap between 2 players in a duel is very small you are still gonna get farmed. you need to keep mental timers in your head for armor/health, you need to have very fast reactions and precise aim while moving fast. on top of that movement itself is a mechanic that a new players find hard lol. I wouldn't say Doom is dead a ton of people played doom 2016 and Eternal. There is a new quake being made currently, i hope people will suck it up and play it long enough to actually improve and give the game a chance when it releases.
Yep. Dr. Disrespect tried Quake Champions, enjoyed it, the player count spiked for a day but he immediately decided it'd be too much work to be good at it so he dropped it. Now Gianni Matragrano (pro voice actor, voices Gabriel in Ultrakill) streams QC every friday. Streamed the first one on YT, called it "Fraggy Friday", single-handedly shot the player count up tenfold because in his words "people are looking for permission to play". I hop on all the time, it's still fun, you can still get matches quick. We don't actually know if there's a new Quake being developed, just rumors.
I tried playing Doom 2016 deathmatch a few time recently but without a server browser or at least an active player count I had no idea how long it would take to find a match or what to queue for to improve my chances. I waited for like 25mins and no match on PC feelsbad
@@colbyboucher6391 Gianni Matragrano sounds like someone who knows what's up, giving people a space where they feel they can just play. No need to do well or grind, no pressure to go pro or be the next hit Twitch streamer, just to play in the most enjoyable sense of the word. I've seen similar reactions to fighting games, RTS, and I expect it's related to why some people are just scared of playing games to begin with. Broadly a fear of failure, that quite frankly is common everywhere AFAICT, and more narrowly that in the 90s and early 00s there wasn't really an Esports scene. Yes you had MLG and WCG doing events, but it wasn't anything like it is now, it wasn't really the focus of multiplayer games the way it is now. It's always hard to struggle and learn to get into a game, to lose 20 games in a row, but it's especially hard when there's this pervasive sense that your play is something of a job interview, and that if you don't play well right now you just shouldn't play at all. It makes it nearly impossible to just enjoy the movement, the spectacle, the little victories you get as you master the game, and the fun accidents that you can't help but laugh at, when all of that is overshadowed by feeling like you have to win or you have to leave, because if you're not gonna go pro why play at all.
i am so glad i experienced the golden era of arena shooters and LAN parties. starting with Quake1 and stuck with Q3A for so many years, rocking the german and european CTF scene it was a blast
I'd argue Halo 2 coming out is what killed arena shooters. As for a revival? Well, eSports has never been hotter so it may slot in there but it'll never be as big as it was. Shame as I have such fond memories of it.
Doom Eternal's multiplayer was extremely unique and well-designed, but people didn't engage with it... seems like most people basically didn't even give it a chance, which feels like a shame to me.
It's just how things are now. Titanfall's multiplayer was the same, adored by a few (including me) for the speed, the movement and the skill involved beyond twitchy reflexes but that put lots of people off. These days FPS games are obsessively optimised for balance and competitive play - because streamers and esports bring the big money - which means they can't focus on unpredictable physics engines, random weapon spawns or wacky movement. It's too random and hard to predict for the pro players (who definitely aren't in it for the fun, and aren't fun to play with) and we can't have little Timmy giving up because he can't master the janky rocket jump before spending dad's cash on a dozen skins
I started gaming in 2011, a little late for the peak of arena shooters, but I still had the opportunity to play games like Tribes: Ascend and some Quake for a couple hundred hours each and I loved them! TF2 and Overwatch are two games that wear their movement-based arena shooter influence on their sleeve and that's why I still play them after years and years. I just always want to go fast while shooting people🤣
I say, Team Fortress 2 really does feel like it has the same sort of appeal as the original arena shooters did. The series does have Quake DNA coursing through its veins, after all. Do wish there was more hint of Unreal in it though, but the most we could count on that would probably be in some promo item. But since the window of opportunity to do that with UT4 has long passed, I don't think that will happen.
@@sulphurous2656 I'm still praying for another true Tribes game. Add some good background lore/story, emphasis the classes as fun characters with personality, and keep the insane skiing mechanics and giant ctf maps! I doubt it'll ever happen though, the skill floor for most arena shooters is too high for most casual players and they simply don't work on console from my experience
I remember being 13 back in 1998 when my mom said she'd get the hardware to let me game on the PC. The PC was a new 400mhz Pentium 3, which wasnt bad back then. I stuck a VooDoo3 3000 gfx card in it. I remember getting the 3000 instead of the 2000 because the 3000's box advertised "3D gameplay at 60fps" lol. I went home with that card and Unreal that day - best birthday ever, because it was the only point in time when my family could afford to get me anything like it. The arena shooters looked ad played like a dream on that rig. I found myself playing more GTA and GTA2 than anything though back then, introducing me to making mods.
@@JathraDH - in many cases a SLI Voodoo2 setup was still faster than Voodoo3, at least the 2000 and 3000 models. Hell, within the recommended UT specs, a Pentium II 233-300, a single Voodoo2 was as fast as a Voodoo3, let alone SLI which carried that performance over to 1024x768.
@@JathraDH - also, the story makes sense. They got the PC in 1998 (P II 400 launched almost exactly a year before Voodoo3) and then they stuck a Voodoo3 in it so it couldn't come with one from the factory.
These were the games my friends older siblings would play when I was over at their house playing Pokemon or Mario. I've gotten really enamored with them in the last few years, and even though I'm not very good at them there's something really mesmerizing about the endless fragging and crazy strafe jumping, the edgy futuristic arenas and weapons and the hypnotic late 90s rock and electronica. A large part of it is probably nostalgia, but to me it's like a pure distillation of everything that action games are about, and playing a round of deathmatch in QL, UT99 or Xonotic is an adrenaline rush like no other.
How did you get through this entire video without ever mentioning the fact that UT4 was mechanically essentially complete, played like an absolute dream, and then was just completely abandoned in favor of Fortnite? *That* is why the arena shooter is dead: because the developers of one of arguably the most well-known arena shooter franchise in history made it all the way to the finish line, and then said "hmm... nah." I will never forgive them for that. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and condemning an entire genre in the process.
I think the biggest issue is the skill-ceiling / gap / matchmaking. The only way to get into arena shooters back then was to endure hours upon hours of ownage until you got "good enough". People that got into it a few years earlier had a huge advantage to any newcomer (and still have today). Nowadays everyone expects to jump into a new game and be able to win in a few rounds. That's not happening with arena shooters. They look simple from the outside but are way more complicated than more "sophisticated looking" games. And there is just no reason to release new ones because the genre already reached perfection back in 2000-2010
I am not so sure of that actually, because if you were to design a new arena shooter in this day and age you would also implement skill based match making etc. If you pick the older CoD titles that relied on P2P matchmaking you could often have blow out scores like 60-1 because SBMM was not in play, this al changed with matchmaking and dedicated servers. True that in the old days you had to endure hours of being destroyed. Nowadays kids expect to win after 3 games.
@@BertM3 The problem with skill based matchmaking is, it only works if the playerbase is big enough and the ratings are well balanced. Usually, the game is long dead before the playerbase even gets big enough or calibrated for good matchmaking to kick in. It's why all the existing indie- (and AAA tbh) arena shooters are kinda dead. because there's a small elite playing them, and everyone else has no way to enter.
The problem with this genre is they cannot do a system what separate the casual and the veteran player. Quake Champions suck in the boot... I see the toxic retarded egoist morons 24/7 always, so this makes sense, they dominate in 85%percent of the game time. SO if I enter playing after work for 3hours, from that 3 hour minimum 2 I playing with those mofos. Thats why this franchise suck in nutshell... Another big hit the tutorials missing for circle jump, strafe jump, rocket jump, momentum, aimskill tests, maps, server browser SO this in nutshell giving the big FUK YOU from a casual player... Good luck guys if you want to play on a desert with 1k players...
@@madpew Problem with Skill based match making is that you never really get to a point where it feels like you have improved as a player, sure. objectively you will have (hopefully) improved, but in terms of how the matches feel to play, there is no real difference, with dedicated servers and no skill based match making, sure you would be curb stomped in the beginning and be at the bottom of the leaderboard, but as you learned and improved you could actually see and feel tangible improvement, especially if you played with roughly the same core group
what i remember hearing from someone, is that the core has gone so small that only the hardcore are the most active. but otherwise it shouldn't be hard to play afps because they're fundamentally just walk and shoot + the emphasis is more on resources management
Yes, my generation gave the world the true MP scene. Original Yellow Disc Counter Strike, Ricochet, DOOM , Quake, UT99, and even better..... Teamspeak/Ventrillo/Gamespy and one of my favorites for a long time RTCW/Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Starcarft 1/Brood War online was awesome. Diablo 1/2+LOD Awesome. We understood the true value of friendship by gibbing and our hearts became strong, full of love, and lead/energy/unknown matter. And that was when my dad got Dial up AOL so we had either phone time/playtime.... or .... back when the 2mbps connection router from NY RoadRunner Internet came around and we didn't need to deal with that. OMG, was so huge . Children who play now will never know that as they jump onto discord and play. Imagine, only texting in game.... learning to type and slaughter simultaneously... and that was it. Arena shooters are still capable of staying with everyone, let's just give them the VR jump!
*Please don't read this with a snarky or angry voice. I didn't write it with either. Just my thoughts, but I realize it might come off that way. Arena shooters didn't die because they were an outdated concept. They died because they are incredibly difficult to play on console effectively, and from 2005 until about 2010 (maybe 2011) AAA publishers and developers abandoned PC (particularly of note is Epic). In the early 00's where Unreal Tournament and Quake were doing great on PC, their console counterparts suffered (and there were many attempts to get those IPs on consoles). The mobility, speed, and accuracy required to play an arena shooter in its purest form is not compatible with a controller. That remains true to this day. The only reason Halo survived is because it was built from the ground up to be played on console. Halo is slower than a traditional arena shooter, and low grav makes it easier to hit targets as they move through the air. Halo was clowned by PC players as a nerfed arena shooter. (Please don't hate on me, I do actually enjoy Halo and always have) That's why they died, but the reason they won't come back is because today's players are used to being spoon fed kills and wins. Overwatch is an extreme example (though the best one I can think of right now), but fairness, competitiveness, and balance all take a backseat to the idea the player should feel good about playing, whether or not they are doing a good job. Negative feedback is suppressed while positive feedback in increased, regardless of how effective the player is being. That ideology is something that should be left for single player, not a competitive multiplayer shooter, imo. This is one of the reasons I think players have such a hard time getting better at a games these days. With Arena shooters negative feedback is immediate and harsh. In most cases, there is no one else to blame but yourself (unless you think the other person is "cheating"). With the exception of hardware, players are on a completely level playing field in an Arena shooter. Realizing you lost an engagement because you got outplayed is a hard pill to swallow. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. P.S. I miss the 2K4CTF Community.
Arena shooters share the same issue with Base Building RTS games (like C&C and Battle for Middle Earth), they are one trick ponies. That's not to say they aren't amazing. They are usually so well designed that it puts AAA games to shame. Sadly they don't get the consistent player base as the game is usually focused on 1 thing
My dude, I was there for the entire evolution of the FPS genre, from Wolfenstein 3-D through DooM and everything which followed. There was never a better time in gaming than the height of the arena shooter, which peaked with Unreal Tournament 2004, and there hasn't been a better time for FPS gaming since. Hell, I still go back to play the classics like Quake and UT99 regularly just because there hasn't been anything better made since. Sure, the graphics have been improved in many ways, but there's just nothing to replicate the essence, passion and soul of those top-tier arena shooters anymore. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go kill Xan Kriegor on Godlike difficulty again.
@@jamesvella Quake Champions is more of the grindy gacha loot box RNG bullshit they replaced our good shooters with. At least DooM Eternal has some good content.
@@TheRealSkeletor Yeah I spend a great deal of time in Quake Champions, I dont bother with loot however. I was thinking about buying Doom Eternal, do you play the multiplayer? I was wondering if it got better since I seen it has deathmatch now and the only reason I didnt buy it from the start was I only want to play Deathmatch (not the battlemode)
Lmao no that isn't the "arena shooter spirit" at all and that's part of the problem, people don't get how deep these games can go. Shitty mindless FFA lobbies were always the worst part.
I think omitting 343's and Microsoft's failures in developing and delivering halo games after bungie equates to not giving the games a fair shake in this video. Myself and many people I know want halo infinite to succeed but month after month there continues to be no meaningful development, just backtracking on promises in favor of greedy monetization or core features of previous titles being delivered incomplete and delayed far behind expectations
I grew up with Arena Shooters and CS 1.6 / Source. I also played other genres regularly but FPS was my best field also because of my insane reaction and my love for precision. I also think that the time is simply over for very simplistic games like these, but naturally there will always be gamers that come back to them. The raw skill, the fast, rythmic, trance like gaming sessions are just something different and offer an uncomplicated experience. In 2013 Nadeo launched Shootmania, a clean e-sportsy Arenashooter with looots of different (custom) modes. I was tryharding Trackmania for a while back then, and I was there right at the beginning of SM. I was completely hooked and after some months I was part of the creme de la creme in 2 of the game modes. Unfortunately it was already a gamble to bring out a new arena shooter at that time, and combined with a few bad decisions by the developers it died very, very fast. After focussing more on RTS games in the last years, I come back to SM every now and then for casual fun with the last remaining nerds ^^.
you know, i`m not an old fan that played Quake and Unreal Tournament back in the day but when i discovered the Arena FPS, i fell in love with it, i love the fast paced movement of Arena FPS games and i play old Unreal Tournament and Splitgate, but seeing this fall of the genre gives me an absolute heartbreak because it is a genre that deserves more atention
halo infinite was the closest we had to a comeback. the gaming community at large wanted it to be good, but a bad launch and a mediocre live support content drip led to the current player numbers. I like to think that there will be a new arena shooter that will come out and be super cool, good, and unique, but we'll have to wait and see.
That little retro-FPS boom that was trendy among indy devs after the release of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal was probably the closest thing we'll have to a retro-FPS/arena shooter revival. It was a trend for a few short years, then it fizzled out shortly after Doom Eternal's release.
I played 100s of hours of Doom16 multiplayer. Perfect blend of fun, movement, not too serious etc. Eternal not having classic deathmatch killed it for me.
The skill ceiling is also an issue for new gamers. I played Quake Champions not that long ago for the first time, and I got absolutely destroyed, over and over again. And let me tell you: I fucking loved it! Reminded me of when i got into multiplayer FPS as a kid, and getting that first 1v1 frag and then the first win feels so god damn earned. Issue is, many new gamers are so used to playing bots and getting feed wins early now they never got to experience what it takes to actually good good at a game. My boss talked me into playing Fortnite, and I won my first 10 games, but as im playing and destroying these "players" i start to realize that those are actually bots. Same with COD lobbies. If a new player boots up a game and gets destroyed over and over again, they don't try to get better anymore, they just call it a bullshit game and uninstall. The companies do it for one simple reason; if a player thinks they are good at a game, they will stay for the dopamine. If they stay long term in the game, the easier it is to justify buying battle passes or skins. Its sad, but its the reality of the world now. However, 500 players is still enough to regularly get games, and ussually the players in games like that are much less toxic. Never experienced a more friendly community in gaming that the quake community. Sure they still have toxic players, but they also have dudes that will destroy you in ranked 1v1, and then add you as a friend and give you pointers. Thats not rare either, its extremely common in games like that.
UT99 and games like them are never coming back. Fact is, one player if skilled enough can wipe the entire other team with zero deaths if they're just casual players. It might be an adrenaline rush for the skilled player to take on an entire team solo, but it's just utter humiliation for casual players. It's why games like Halo that essentially used the same formula but slowed down to 25% speed and with lots of explosive weapons that forgo the need for aiming gained so much popularity.
Thats a fact yeah. Tbf I would love to see some of the best PC FPS players from valorant, csgo, apex, and whatever in an Unreal Tournament match. That would be sick to watch
All first person shooters that have multiplayer maps are arena shooters.... from quake to counterstrike to call of duty to battlefield; they are all arena shooters, just different size and esthetics.
LAN parties were the best. Such great times. The convenience of online gaming is great, but nothing like the feeling of everyone bringing their setups together and staying up all night eating junk food and laughing and yelling at each other.
I once attended a LAN party for 12 days straight (slept at my computer between gaming sessions) with over 20 other guys playing around the clock. What an experience! LAN > Online Gaming. I still have saved replays from playing StarCraft 1 that are now almost 25 years old from that same LAN party. lol
Agreed, Halo CE on 4 consoles, 4 players per console. And having to lug your 68cm TV to your friends house needing 3-4 people to carry it.
Fun times
@@adrianthom2073 During one LAN party (we use to host or attend one every Monday after school), we once had a neighbor call the cops on us because she thought we were steeling TV's (carrying our computers into the house). The police officer showed up, leaned into the house to see a bunch of nerdy kids playing video games, immediately leaned into his radio and called off the investigation. lol None of us even got up from our chairs to greet him at the door... NOT DURING MY GAME OF MECHWARRIOR!
The Norwegian demo group The Errors started hosting a *monthly* LAN-party at a local youth club back in 1994. 10BASE2 was the norm, USB drives didn't exist, nor did CD-ROM, and there was no Internet anywhere but at universities. Only a gaggle of young nerds with (mostly) beige computer towers and heavy CRTs playing whatever game was the new fancy. There was a lot of multiplayer DOOM and Command & Conquer, I remember. :) Errors Party is _still_ active, though now it's slightly larger and held twice a year.
What stopping you from acting like this when you are adults having lan partys
On of the things I miss as much as arena shooters was touched on very briefly in this video. The simple phrase "join a server". Joining a server meant you got to know people, because we'd join the same few servers every day. From that, forums and communities grew and friendships were made. Some of my best friends today are people I met in 1998 playing Quake 2. Even as recently as 2016 TF2 still had this. These days it's all matchmaking, and we seldom see the same people more than once, let alone often enough to form a relationship. I've played Overwatch for nearly 8 years now, and I've made zero new friends from it, compared to the many I made from playing Quake 2/3, UT2004 and TF2.
This is more important than people realize. While you had access to every server you'd normally stick to the ones that had the best ping which meant that you'd keep seeing the same faces. You'd also figure out the server skill hierarchy as the same names would often stick to the top of the leaderboard, there's much more of a bell curve with the skill spread rather than a flat line and that's something I honestly miss as it was easier to compare yourself across what the playerbase could do.
I miss the days of private servers... every game these days seems to focus on the companies own servers which IMHO aren't as fun.
atleast Gmod still has them
If you're looking for a great arena shooter that has a pretty solid community, would definitely recommend Open Fortress. Totally free mod based on some old leaked TF2 source code and it plays like a dream, with the obvious bonus of the TF art style to boot.
Even old WON based Counter Strike and early GameSpy had this, heck it even followed into early steam for universities into the mid 2000s "who has rcon access, change the map!" that phrase and many others helped develop remote ops for a shit load of tools because us gamers grew up with that mindset.
Unreal Tournament was not just a regular game, it got alot of generations into drum and bass, it was a culture. And they killed it over a soulless game.
Drum and bass? It's more like 90's synth music and industrial
@@pearljaime2 hmm let me see… no?
Ahh, the Unreal Tournament. 170 000 frags (yes, it was counted) ... and then I went online. And then there was UT2003. And then UT2004.
Actually it was underground jungle way back in 90s but yeah i get goosebumps just by remebering how thrilling mp was.
Unreal 99 has best fkn music and it came with sooo many maps no dlcs
My problem with modern shooters is too much "down time." With arena shooters, you have nice short respawn times so even if you're not doing well, you're still "in the action" for the majority of the time. Because of that, deaths aren't frustrating, they're just learning experiences.
I'm the same man. I hear you. I can play CoD series as they are enough to be said fast paced game but I no matter how many times I've tried, I cannot get on to CSGO or Valorant type of games man...
Yeah, it really surprises me that Battle Royale games have taken off so much. The concept is interesting, but whenever I see someone play it there just seems to be so much waiting. Sitting around in a lobby, loading and counting down, and then running around hiding and looting alone until your get shot and killed in two seconds, and that's that. In Q3 or UT you just click "join" press space and then start blasting non stop until you're done.
Exactly. Like that Epic's latest hit, Fortnite, at best moments it gets fairly fast action - but after dying there is absolutely ridiculously long waiting time to get back to action. Pretty much same in other titles.
In arena shooters it was *oops, dead*, and 1 second later you are back running and shooting, fragging maybe someone the next second.
It creates intensity in the gameplay I sorely miss.
@@cupriferouscatalyst3708 seriously, people who play solo br without a squad are miserable. So much dead time between gun fights, without the boys there's no point sitting through all that
@@cupriferouscatalyst3708 I've not kept up with the genre so I'm not sure how this holds up, but it used to be that ~50% of players played BR's like it was more of an arena shooter. They'd all parachute into the same central area and within a minute or two most of them would be dead and gone.
There's an argument to be made that despite the popularity of battle royale shooters, most of their playerbase don't actually want to play them.
Man, I can remember playing Unreal Tournament back in high school. Our computer sciences teacher was a dedicated gamer, and he had a hidden file on his computer with UT in it. After school, a group of six or eight of us, including the ComSci teacher, would head to the computer lab and play UT, Quake, or 007 for a couple hours. UT was definitely my favorite, and I spent hours between 2001 and 2003 playing it with my friends at the school. That first year after I graduated, I'd still go back and play from time to time. I miss it
Something I thought was important to bring up is that Splitgates popularity was seemingly influenced pretty hard by Halo infinite's hype cycle, and that at least my friend group played it as a temporary Halo 6.
False people who don't even like halo or ever even played it played splitgate it blew up fora while just couldn't substane all the success because the team of only 4 people was to small they had to rapidly start expanding then they got funded Like 10 million dollars and caned support to make a game the fans deserved from the start stay tuned 1043 games isn't done yet.
@@sluttyboy69 Because a few people who never played or don't like Halo played Splitgate, that somehow makes Splitgate less like Halo? Smooth brain logic right here. The game is nearly identical to Halo 4 but with an added gimmick of portals. If you honestly can't see that, you must not have eyes at all.
I like to think it took the best of halo and the best of cod and made something that was actually good
Splitgate devs said that when Halo Infinite launched, their game doubled in popularity on PlayStation.
@@sluttyboy69 sounds like you always wanted to play halo lmao
I think something that really didnt help the genre was the dropping of single player.
older arena shooters had single player modes/campaigns that, although basically just botmatches, allowed players to familiarise themselves with levels/modes/mechanics.
All UT games had a single-player campaign, maybe it wasn't so much a reasonable thing with Q3A because the bots weren't nearly as good as UT'99's. I have only really played UT with bots.
@@unfa00 although it didnt have as much *context* as ut, q3a had a campaign too.
Im talking about later.
@@FozzieOscar Quake 3 Revolution had a campaign. Quake 3 Arena did not.
I'm not sure that was what did it, especially since we know that multiplayer-only games can be quite successful. The variable of industry scope has to be taken into account moreso, I think. UT'99 sold about 100 000 copies in its first year and that was considered really successful. Titanfall 2, by comparison, was considered a failure for EA at 4 million sales in 3 months. Budgets are much bigger, development time is much longer and more expensive. A game like UT simply can't be made successfully in today's market.
It might do 100 000 sales in its first year, but that won't be a success. The gaming market is so much larger than it was.
@@n00b1f13d That and sadly, the genre has little to innovate. UT2004 is still peak mechanical gameplay in shooters and it still plays exceptionally well today. We have already seen everything the genre can do and is: a cemented name in gaming history.
And game quality even with budgets getting bigger, is declining. Valorant for example, is a trash game, it tries to live under the shadow of CSGO with artificial dopamine stimulating gameplay with powerups and colorful, unintelegible stuff, and people like it.
The arena shooters were a lot more fun when you could go to a particular server that was operated by a particular clan or individual in the community. They would have a huge variety of maps and mods loaded that would always offer something new. Not the same tired map rotation over and over again that would be provided on one of the public servers. I remember playing Unreal4Ever mod with all sorts of wacky weapons (shrink rays, exploding nuke dolls for example) with a huge variety of maps and just having a LOT of fun.
Private servers, lack of monetisation, and moddability are indeed what made these games popular and are why every new attempt at doing them fails, and will keep failing until we get out of this excessive control & monetisation phase the gaming world seems to be in.
Unreal 2004 had some awesome mods. There was a wave based alien mod with the hilarious setting of your character being the size of a small mouse in a bedroom fighting aliens. A mode I loved and have yet to really see again is the assault defend mode. Similar to battlefield 2142 and far more advanced in concept than rush in following battlefield titles. Complete a varying set of objectives to destroy an enemy teams generator. It's the glue you need to take today's non existent team work in games and revive some meaningful semblance.
This is my biggest beef with modern gaming. Most of my fun back-in-the-day was finding servers with people I liked, making friendships, and waiting every day for the chance to get home and hop on with my friends. Today's temporary lobby setup forcing people to disband and go into a matchmaking que every time makes a game feel sterile and lonely. After a while you become familiar with the game but not its community and you get bored.
For me a lot of it comes down to the ability to play *against* the same people repeatedly. Nowadays you only ever get to play on the same side as people you know. It really ruins the experience and social dynamic to only ever play on the same team as your friends.
Yeah in order for arena shooters to make a comeback and again there IS a demand for them, is to put LOADS of emphasis on private servers which is how online games should be played anyway. Matchmakers are cancer and suited only for the "ranked" mode which in turn shouldnt even exist in the first place.
Arena shooters was the peak of gaming. You enter the game, shoot some strangers, they shoot you back - basically 0 downtime, you respawn instantly. No bullshit microtransactions, skins, battle pass, Lilith with AK47. Competetive, but not "sweaty" and toxic. Pure fun
About 15 years ago, I managed to convince the IT Technician to hide Quake 3 on the schools servers for year 10/11 students (my year), so we could play it on lunchbreaks, LAN games across a school was something to see.
Unreal Tournament 1999 will always hold a special place in my heart and will always be my favourite game. My sister and i grew up playing it, not necessarily together all the time, but a lot, nonetheless. We would watch dad play it a lot and I got into it from a young age, though at that age not very fond of the gore, I loved the game regardless and I still do.
When UT4 came out years later, I introduced my partner to the game and we would play for hours, I taught him everything I knew about the game, from strafing, to shock rifle combos to capture the flag. We had so much fun, and we got our other friends to play with us. It was the closest we'd ever get to playing unreal tournament together.
We play splitgate occasionally now, but the game is just dominated by bots and there aren't that many maps either. It is still fun to play with friends and the portal mechanic is really fun, yet can be hard to get used to.
The music from Unreal Tournament has always been my comfort soundtrack. I owe a lot to that game.
they've taken the old servers offline..
@@psychosomatiqueofficial That means nothing, the OldUnreal patches for Unreal have long added redundant master servers, and OldUnreal's 469 patch for UT99 does the same. There's also replacement master servers for UT3 and UT2004, as well.
The fanbase will keep these games up and running, even if Epic refuses to even acknowledge their legacy.
@@psychosomatiqueofficial fuck Epic Games
The soundtrack is an absolute masterpiece
I’m playing with Unreal Engine these days because I remember playing Unreal Tournament. I should check up on the sound track.
I graduated HS in the early 2000's - my senior year I took a vocational Cisco networking class. The class was new so it wasn't really fleshed out too well and for a few weeks we didn't have the networking hardware to carry on with our lesson so we just turned the computer lab into a LAN and played Q3, UT and HL Op4 for weeks. I miss that class.
I learned all about IP/SPX/NetBIOS and whatnot from LAN Parties back in the days of DOS gaming. Got to load those TSRs and allocate memory in order to load NetBIOS. Gaming is a practical vocation. :)
I learned a hell of a lot about networking through lan setups as well. Great way to learn!
What’s HL OP4? I’m curious.
@@Ickarichi Half Life: Opposing Force
That's awesome
I think Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal show that arena shooters could have a chance. Multiplayer will still be incredibly difficult to pull off while maintaining that classic Arena shooter style, but Doom''s campaigns have astounding gameplay that I feel a game like Unreal Tournament could take notes from. I don't know what to do about multiplayer, but you could absolutely take Doom'16/Eternal's gameplay style and roll with it into Unreal Tournament to some degree while building a cool new story with all of the characters, lore and whatnot into it.
Doom Eternal's problem was nixing the multiplayer from 2016. Nothing against Battlemode- not my cup of tea, but applause to Bethesda for trying something new and putting effort into the level design. The game would've benefitted from having more options for those of us who didn't enjoy it.
Not only did Epic stop working on UT in 2017 but they removed UT 99-2004 from Steam. Good job Epic.
I didn’t grow up on arena shooters, and basically the first one i played was splitgate. It instantly hooked me, and no other game has come close to the pure fun of splitgates gameplay. I find myself experimenting and finding new insane stunts and killing methods all the time, and thats probably why i still play it semi regularly, largely depending on if ive got someone to play with
One thing I'll say is it's never too late to get into them. I got into the arena shooter genre in 2014, long after it stopped being mainstream. I didn't grow up with these games at all... yet, I committed. I found people to play with, and I ended up falling in love with the genre so much through my experiences that these games are what I think of when it comes to shooters.
Quake 3 Arena ended up becoming possibly my favorite shooter at all time yet all my gameplay experiences of it were in 2014-2016 long after it was dead. I've had some crazy duel matches. I've experimented with all the weapons, developed map strategies, have pulled off "sick combos". I've hosted gaming events and we would have people spectate over duels. We've done CTF. I was able to do some crazy shit in Quake 3 man... I played the game in competitive settings which made the game crazy fast. I'd fly and chase after players aggressively, curving around corners. Using the lightning gun (a beam based weapon with high knockback) to push players back as I move after them and then launching them back in the air with rockets every time I'd get them in a spot where I could hit them. I evolved into this kind of "Quake god" despite being like, 15 years late to the party.
Point is, I'd really recommend looking for a way to get into the genre if it seems like it's something that's your cup of tea. Don't let the "oldness" or "unpopularity" of the genre deter you from playing. Some of these are _really_ good games with really interesting weapon mechanics, movement mechanics, strategy, and level design. The games might be dead in their actual player count but if you find people you can play with and drag into these games and get something going... more than worth it imo.
That's a shame. I only ever played the Bungie Halo's when they were relevant and it was a great time for Arena gaming, let me tell you. The lan party's on custom forge maps/gamemodes with non-stop action gaming is still to this day, for me, unmatched by any other game. Splitgate is however a pretty good game by today's standards.
I liked them because you could, just on a whim, load the game, connect to a deathmatch server with the lowest ping, and play a couple 10-15 minute games. Newer online FPS games seem much longer, slow-paced,/tactical, and depend on high team cohesion (which isn't really possible unless you coordinate your game time with your friends).
Totally. And this is a strange thing because you'd think "more team cohesion" would be better only for lan parties and split screen, which are also things of the past
That's why the only mode I played CS GO in past few years was Deathmatch with instant respawn.
Yep, old COD was like that but these days it's so slow and everyone takes games so seriously now. Early 2000s people just played for fun, now it's life and death
Csgo has dm. Free for all as well as Team. Your choice.
Newer games are also often a lot more mental engagement too. Back in Unreal Tournament 2K4 days, I remember being able to just fall into a rhythm while bs'ing with complete strangers.
Unreal Tournament is what got me into game development. We would make skins on Paint Shop Pro, maps on Unrealed, the music was awesome, the multiplayer mode was awesome, the maps were out of this world... and all that on my Pentium II 300 Mhz with 64 mb of RAM and a 16 mb graphics card with 3dfx. Man, we had the time of our life.
Me too:) Good to know you had similar life experience:)
Indeed it was, the ability to create your own content was what kept me going in those games for so long, I used to run my own UT2004 servers with my own custom content until games like the at the time new World Of Warcraft pulled the attention of me and my friends away. After that new games using the FPS mechanic but featuring good stories to play along to became the norm.
When I was 11 I used to make doom/hexen mods, I've done half life maps and then unreal tournament maps. That led me to programming too! Unreal weapon mechanics were magic, I still remember Frigate and Facing worlds layouts I used to play with friends for hours, good times :')
i remember getting one of the first athlon and geforce systems and i got insane FPS on it.
@@kanedNunable Yeah so did I, it was an Athlon 2400 I think, and the card was a TI-42.
A large skill gap is an issue for arena shooters too. I tried getting into Reflex, but the lobbies were often reduced to 1v1s and I would get my ass handed to me every time. Often difficult to find players of similar skill to grow with, while being destroyed constantly just drives people away. This paired with lack of meaningful feature innovation probably killed off the genre.
Skill gap exist in every game. But in fast paced arena shooters is crucial. You just cant rat there. You have to move, frag, defend position, time, cover teammates, etc.. If your team rat than it loose for sure. When I was young I been also destroyed many times badly, but I made it to some certain level and succeed in some tournaments with my team. Todays young want everything for free and now. And developers listen to it and gave tham aim assist. With that they choose rather BR styles games where they can rat and AI when killed someone with AA give tham that dopanim satisfaction that they couldnt archive in old school gengre.
Sounds like the same excuse people give for fighting games
@@marian0321 I agree that many skill gap complaints are from people who didn't take enough time to actually practice the skills necessary to keep up, but I also see nothing wrong with rank/stat based matchmaking. I think there's nothing wrong with including features in games that help players develop the necessary skills to close that skill gap a bit to compete online, maybe incentivize high rank players with better rewards if they use handicaps when they face lower rank players, that way new players might last longer and veterans can learn to do more with less. I personally never have issues figuring out multiplayer games, I always learn by watching or befriending skilled players.
you have to be able to learn the game in order to play the game. Arena shooters and fighting games are both awful for it, and the community is super toxic, too - the peak "reward" for being "good" at the game is being able to stomp people who aren't. Then the community, which insists on a nearly vertical learning curve, gets mad when their religion isn't practiced by the gaming community as a whole and the entire thing self-destructs because you can't sustain a development cycle for Quake Champions based on the die-hard 1%ers that want to run everything for themselves.
Same's true for Mobas, but say what you want about league's matchmaking, it at least lets the community grow.
I remember being just awful when I started. Basically what I did then is crank the bot difficulty to Godlike in Unreal Tournament and played game after game after game until I started to win and then I was one of the best among my friends at the time. That skill gap was there when just about all of us started and we had to adjust because honestly there wasn't much else to play at the time so it was get better or just not play.
Remember kids: because of Fortnite we lost Unreal Tournament 4
Blame PUBG, they did it first. Fortnite just stole their idea and made it even more mainstream via console release, kid appealing cartoon graphics and free to play.
If Tim Sweeny really cared he could make a new unreal tournament, as good as 99. They make so much money from Fortnite it could support it.
@@jimmypeeps8471 and dances - don't forget dances
Too busy fighting for an app store to gouge people on. Epic is a soulless company now.
@@jimmypeeps8471 Epic developers abandoned Unreal Tournament 4 and switched to Fortnite when Fortnite blew up like it did. That is why we blame Fortnite and not PUBG. Fortnite killed the UT4 development.
Games today are completely pussified compared to UT, Quake etc...
100
Exactly. They only cater to simps and idiots who love microtransactions.
Agree, they are for the masses now... kind of understandable...
I was at precisely the right age for Quake to become my first gaming love - the baseline upon which I compare all that followed. The hours I spent exploring that game's weird, surreal worlds feel like they are written into my soul, and the mods - oh my gosh, the mods - encouraged me to get into coding and mapping. When the demo for Unreal Tournament arrived in September 1999 I was right there in the download queue. The visuals, the frantic energy, the bright colours and the mindblowing soundtrack - aw hell. I didn't think it could get any better. To be honest, I still don't.
When I think 'FPS' I think rocket launchers, fiends, shamblers, super nailguns and eldritch nightmare labyrinths; I think flak cannons, shock rifles and miniguns, spaceships and green slime. They were the worlds I escaped into when everything around me seemed insurmountable. They gave me space to think, and an excuse to stop thinking when that became too much. I found my adult self there, in those gloomy netherworld catacombs and grimy steel complexes, and when I emerged, it already felt like the genre's Golden Days were beginning to pass.
It's strange - I just can't muster the same love for anything that followed. There is something about that era - the raw, simplistic, often highly abstract or surrealist environments that broadly communicate what they are trying to represent but which have a particular utilitarian and dreamlike sparseness to them - that gives it a low-distraction flow perfect for intense multiplayer. Even just with the addition of Static Meshes and 'busier' maps in the UT sequels, it felt like something pure and raw had been lost in the visual noise.
Counter-Strike, while not an arena shooter, retained a measure of that raw, barebones low-distraction environmental simplicity; it was already starting to feel like a throwback by the time it had reached its first 'full' version, and that was oddly comforting. It also had immense longevity. Meanwhile, the next generation of arena shooters grew and iterated with new game modes and ever greater graphical fidelity, but their long-term staying power always seemed to be somehow lacking. Too busy; too easy to get lost in the noise. I can go back and play UT for days; I get bored of most new arena shooters within hours.
Well said. I think nowadays the focus is on graphics, but not the overall design and atmosphere. Many new games look like a copy of another.
That, and overall map design is not as creative as in the past. It's either corridor shooting or somewhat open, but flat maps with no verticality.
I was born after UT99 released. In 2015 my parents sent me to a coding summer camp being held at some college upstate... the computer lab they gave us was filled with these Windows XP machines that could barely run Roblox. But they DID have a bunch of older games installed - the original Halo CE, and most importantly UT99. That week was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. Imagine a bunch of middle-school aged kids in a computer lab having a UT99 LAN party despite none of them even previously knowing what an "arena shooter" was, years after the genre had died off commercially. It was awesome :)
@@leafdog2714 you are one hell of a lucky kid
I feel the same way, but it was DOOM for me. I walked around elementary school with a thick book called "Tricks of the DOOM Gurus", read it like a bible
Damn, this is a fantastic comment.
So much nostalgia here.
Unfortunately my age has put me in a position where I really cannot compete like I used to.
I miss it though. Such good times.
Welcome to MY world. 52 years old, and reflexes are like 1/10 that of when I was 12 years old. Getting old sucks.
Played quake team fortress back in the day. These days I relax with the coop gameplay of Deep Rock Galactic.
Maybe you can snipe? Youth has nothing on old age and treachery....
Thank you for talking about this, it's a real tragedy. I grew up with Unreal Tournament. Recently re-downloaded UT2004 and have been having a blast!
Lots people still on UT2004?
No offense but I’m 26 so I never played unreal tournament. just base off looking at clips it looks so repetitive and predictable I would rather play OW, CSGO, Apex tbh.
I have awesome memories of some lans on rankin/deck/idoma and the instagib ctf with that chill UT.ogg; I enjoyed ChaosUT2e mod for UT2k4 as well. I accept that it's dead, but at the time it was smth that had me gripped like nothing else, so I'm grateful I got to experience that as a child.
@@MalikATL It definitely was very repetitive, but not very predictable. A lot of the enjoyment was also about the people you played with, and that game was like church for us. There was a very high skill ceiling and no SBMM, with the movement mechanics, map knowledge and control and predicting opponents, especially on 1v1 games. I was never a great player, I remember one night playing a 1v1 ladder with a buddy who killed me 20 to 0, then I specced him playing another friend who in turn killed him 20-0. I immediately asked that guy to 1v1 me and jump on voice and give me some pointers to improve my gameplay. Not to say skill isn't a huge factor in modern games, but it's not as extreme and you don't see such a wide skill gap anymore. There was no RNG in any form, which made it more about personal skill than luck. Also there was an extremely active modding and map making community, more than many games that are lauded for their mod support like skyrim, and many community servers had literally hundreds of high-quality maps in rotation, with voting enabled at end-of-round which kept it super fresh.
@@swishpronoob I have no idea I was just playing with bots for a few hours one evening. Epic took down the master server a while ago, along with all unreal tournament games from store pages, so you'd have to find an IP address from a community website to join an online game now I think.
It's sad how Epic killed Unreal Tournament in favor of Fortnite.
Fortnite is a disgrace.
UT3 killed UT. Despite graphics, UT3 was a significant departure from UT2004. Although there was some improvement with game modes, the maps weren’t as good and movement felt kinda sluggish.
@@3rdHalf1 I just don't see anything wrong with UT3's movement and maps. It's the artstyle that i never liked.
@@3rdHalf1 Epic was developing new UT and it was playable as open alpha but the development was halted indefinitely when Fortnite started printing money and eventually got cancelled completely. I personally loved UT3.
Lack of bot support is what killed the genre, Quake 3, ut99/2004/3 all had great fun bots that meant that anyone could learn and enjoy the game in thier own safe way before jumping into multiplayer where the skill gap can be insurmountably huge. A robust singleplayer experience is important for these kind of games.
I think the killer of the Arena Shooter is over saturation and expectation.
It feels like there's so much available now that there's not much that keeps you to one game anymore.
The last Arena Shooter I enjoyed (before it died) was Tribes Ascend. There was a skill to be learnt in playing the different weight classes and learning to skate around the map using your momentum to its peak was fantastic once you got into it.
Loved tribes ascend lol
I think that was among the first PC games I played after getting my first computer. Definitely a very cool game. Too bad there haven't been more takes on that skiing movement/map design.
Same with MMO's first couple way back when done different things, how many generic survival games do we have now? they're all the same thing with different pictures, over saturation, was like this back when the transition was being made from arcade machines where the onus was on putting coins in the slot over and over again to make money, all the first consoles ( I mean like old atari's) started to churn out the same games with slightly different sprites and packaging and were expecting players to buy loads of cartridges a week, that's where we are again and the actual gameplay hasn't evolved all that much, selling people character customisations is the primary focus of a lot of online games these days unfortunately, these were things you used to unlock playing the game.
Shazbot for real fuck Hi-rez for destroying that game
Oh man Tribes.. One of my fondest memories was my Dad letting me play Tribes Vengeance on his PC as a child. It was my first taste of video games, and needless to say I got HOOKED. The satisfaction of sniping a light armor dude going warp speed, carrying your flag, with a spinfuser *chefs kiss*
I'm so happy I was able to experience this part of gaming at its peak. Unreal Tournament 99, 2003, 2004, Quake 3 Arena etc - It was a special time and there were so many custom maps and mods. We even had Parkour maps in Unreal Tournament 99 called bunny trax. It was such a cool time in gaming.
And that isn't to say games today aren't entertaining, they most certainly are.
Online gaming from 1996 to about 2009-ish was _the_ shit.
Controls were still simple(in most games), private servers, mods, no random lobbies, nobody cared if you swore, hardly any DLCs, p2w or microtransactions...
My sister was the one that got me into shooters, I was a JRPG guy before then. We played so much Unreal Tournament back in the day, it's not even funny. And when UT 03/04 came out, we just couldn't get into it as much as we did back then, and we both had moved on to other things. I went into the military shooters CoD and Battlefield like Level did, as well as horror. She went into the more things like Hitman/Manhunt or sandbox style like GTA and Mafia. But we did have a lot of fun.
I think the level of entry and skill-ceiling in an arena shooter is very high. It makes it hard for newcomers. The only people who are playing the genre these days are highly skilled veterans. I have seen it firsthand when new players try to play but have no chance to learn. I was new at one point but when I entered the genre, I was fortunate to have many others in my same position. I then learned from what high-skilled players did that was correct, added it to my own skills, and grew from there. New players get smashed and then run out of the server if they perform too badly. It sucks.
I find it the opposite. I played UT99 a lot at that time.
I try to play PubG and die with no kills and there's so much wait time, it gets annoying.
So I tried Quake Champions and with the quick respawn its easier to move and get some kills.
Awesome video. Made me very nostalgic for the old days of UT99, CS1.6, TFC, etc.
Definitely spent a ton of time with movement on TFC with rocket jumps on soldier, tons of maps doing concussion grenade jump practice with scout and medic. So many awesome memories, thanks for the vid!
I'd argue that the FPS genre gave way to *simpler* concepts, not bigger ones.
Slow movement, hitscan weapons - these things are not complicated. Anyone can cotton on to the core mechanics pretty quickly. But Unreal Tournament 2004, for example - you have high jumping, double jumping, dodging, dodge jumping, wall dodging, rocket jumping, lift jumping, jumppads, jump boots... About a dozen weapons that can be carried simultaneously, all with alt-fire modes... Several powerup types distributed around each map... Numerous gametypes, some with vehicles... Dozens of hugely different maps loaded with sci-fi concepts...
What results is a much more complex core dynamic in which you have a lot more to learn, and utilise a lot more skill to master. Combat isn't a split-second react-first-to-win, it's a joust in which you dodge each other's projectiles or strafe around each other's hitscan until you've whittled the other player down to 0.
So what hurts these games' popularity is that they have a much higher entry bar. They represent a higher point in a gamer's evolution that most don't put the time or grey matter in to get to - many UT players don't even realise you can dodge, which is the core gameplay mechanic.
So what's really needed is to take these concepts into singleplayer, where players can learn these concepts in an easier environment tailored to helping them learn. Doom 2016 and Eternal did this excellently, and consequently have become some of the most iconic games of recent years.
Unreal Tournament's biggest mistake was dropping the singleplayer-focused Unreal games that they were based on. Introduced the core of the game in singleplayer, then build a multiplayer focused game based on that, and you have a fully schooled playerbase ready to go.
Agreed. Modern shooters are wider, but not deeper. They’re made easier to play to attract more people to visit their microtransaction store, and have reduced skill ceilings so the casual masses don’t get scarred away from spending time in the game and looking at that microtransaction store even more.
Agreed! I'm glad someone around here actually understands how games have been 'dumbed down'.
@@Storm_. I remember that era and thinking one problem I had was that FPS games didn't feature on consoles with controllers that worked for my hands (I wish the XBox Series or PS5 controller layouts had been a thing in those generations just for all the button placement and geography things). But I think the Borderlands games show how some of the core concepts can be done right without a straight up competitive mode.
Truer words are rarely spoken.
Entry bar was never the problem. Shooters like CSGO and Valorant, or MOBAS like LOL or DOTA, require you to know lots of hard knowledge to perform decently, and the game tell you none of it, yet they're very popular
The real thing arena shooters need is marketing, E-sports, and new games. Currently the latest big arena shooter is Quake Champion and it's been dead since 2017, no shit the genre ain't pulling players
I feel like arena shooters will come back when the time is right. Like myself, there's OGs out there who miss the good ole days of arena shooters. All it takes is one company to innovate on the concept. With the amount of creative minds out there, I'm sure they'll make a comeback because the BRs just don't do it for me. I maintain some of the best memories I've ever had when Unreal Tournament was just a game mode in the original Unreal.
I been saying this for years. Everything is cyclic in nature. Style. Fashion. Fads. Arena FPS will absolutely come back and be mainstream, it’s just not the right time.
I predict 10 years it’ll make a comeback.
How about VR? Not now, I believe if you make a VR arena shooter, players would just throw up :). But in the future. Just imagine: this insane game speed and movement with full immersion
@@eliasgvinp2141 some VR arena shooters like hyper dash and quake3vr play excellently without much sickness.
I don't think so, these games need a proper LAN mode, everything us under clients and you are constantly trying to fix some problems which are related to activations, serial keys, always online DRMs and such shits and DRM free games from GOG mostly don't have working multiplayer at all. Return of Arena shooters needs mainly return of classic gaming model without annoying clients. Do you remember how long time it took to return back to game when it crashed in the past? It was a few seconds!!!! You were back literally in 30 seconds, but today, because of all those clients and unskipaple intros and Intel/nvidia logos, you don't have to even go back to game because game already ended. 🙂 Classic multiplayer experience just died with online clients.
Yeah, I think there's a lot that could be done with the genre's spirit, but too many have been essentially carbon copies of quake or ut. I think the issue is less about having an arena game "go big" and more about keeping a higher than usual player retention by continuing to hammer on features not present in bigger titles. I think clever designs on social features and community interactions are needed (randomly, user playstyle, or regionally assigned stat tracking factions, rival system, longform/meta series of matches and matchmaking (winning a best of series across a week to influence a future map release, for example). A good bot system is probably also being neglected, AI assisted content generation (maps), and adding collab emphasis on user content is probably going to be key innovations in the next decade.
I was introduced to arena shooters in 2016 coming from CSGO and I really fell in love with it. It felt like the highest display of skill in a video game, and dueling felt like a chess game, where brains would always be the most important aspect. However, learning how to play arena shooters (movement, mechanics, learning how to duel) was the most difficult part to achieve and understand, and I think it's why it fell off in the modern era. Spending time just to focus and learn how to even stand a chance in a duel is a process not many would want to go through when there are a lot easier games to get into now. Learning arena shooters took me a hundred hours of just getting destroyed to learn anything lol
It super doesn't take 100 hours, though.
Like, if I play Counter-Strike, I survive for all of 20 seconds per round as I die horribly because my pinky finger was visible through a sewer grate I didn't know about.
Quake Champions? Diabotical? Strafe jumping took *maybe* an hour to basically figure out and casual game modes without item timers were an easy way to get used to maps before playing duels where map knowledge actually matters. You can't get bullied *too* hard because you sort of just zoom around everywhere.
Dueling was never the most popular part of arena shooters by a long shot anyway. It was my favorite genre and I almost exclusively played team games especially CTF.
@@colbyboucher6391 You severely underestimate my stupidity and laziness. Would the average gamer dedicate a whole hour to learning how to strafe jump, you think? Arena shooters have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling. That's a turnoff for most casuals.
I was about to write a post on this but you already touched the subject matter.
Arena games required complete control both physically (a decent mouse was a must-have, a good sharp monitor, good Ping), technically (some white-hat modding, etc.) and of course high level of skill was necessary (no upgrades, no cheap cuts, no in-game purchases for better weapons). The entry point to play on satisfactory level was... I'm sorry to say but unachievable on consoles at the time, and it completely cut that market off.
To be honest, I do have a level of despise to modern "story mode" assisted shooters with pre-scripted cut-offs. I can't see them as true skill-based experiences.
What I came here to say. These games are hard as hell and most gamers today do not have the patience for that..and companies only follow the money
I just want a modern TimeSplitters/Perfect Dark, split screen, bots, online, this is all.
I really did love Lawbreakers it was the first game since UT that captured that true arena feel to it. Sad it didn't flourish.
Sadly I only got to play Lawbreakers in the beta because my PC died the year it was released. However... those weeks of playing were some of the funnest times I ever had playing a modern shooting game.
I don't really consider myself a "shooter guy" anymore but for me, when I do play a shooter, these are the games that I think of when it comes to the genre. If Lawbreakers was still around, even if the game was _dead_ but still playable, I _would_ go out of my way to hop on it because the game was just that awesome. I've done the same with Quake, Unreal, etc.
I honestly can't get behind modern shooting games. They just aren't "shooters" to me. They focus more on other gimmicks. Co-op "looter shooters", "extraction shooters", military shooters, class-based "hero shooters". It's like, you can't just have a game with interesting weapon mechanics, movement, and level design. Instead it has to be a military simulation game where you have to realistic "bullet weapons" that all function the same and the actual combat takes only like a quarter of a second. Or it has to be a game with "abilities" where the combat itself is really a non-factor and its just what character picks you have on your team.
It's weird because I didn't even "grow up" with the arena shooter genre and I had such a late exposure to it, but I can't stand these modern types of shooters. Games with ADS or quick kill times or slow bullet spongey combat. For me I'll always be an arena shooter guy through and through.
All thanks to cliff bleszinski and possibly the worst marketing campain of all time when it comes to games
When he wasnt making enemies of every gaming sub culture on the planet the marketing was making sure nobody would play it anyway by basically being "modern games suck but our game is not like other girls"
Kinda a shame I missed out on that one, but it's killed now anyway, right?
@@kael13 I believe there is custom servers now that can be played on PC I believe that's the last I heard. Someone is kinda keeping it alive.
Not quite an arena shooter, but tribes ascend was such a great game, loved the crazy speeds
It was wonderful, but IMO the downfall of Tribes in general vs. others was the absurd reliance on midairs. Pretty much no one ever died because something like an actual fight couldn't even happen until you'd played for at least, like, 30 hours.
@@colbyboucher6391 the fact that you had to play 100hrs to get a weapon or a new class? that was the problem, not the flying thing. ALSO, semi-hitscan weapons were in the shop and not as simple to get them.
@@saveborg1091 Yes, it was the flying thing, don't kid yourself.
@@colbyboucher6391 not the fact that there were grenade launchers? kunais? slow proj weapons? there were hitscan weapons. Flying was to satisfying and was the core of the game. if you had no fun cos you were not able to kill anybody... it's up to you, skill gap ngl
@@saveborg1091 What I'm saying is that the vast, VAST majority of people had no fun because they couldn't kill anyone, yes. Like I said, the skill gap was so high that very few people in most matches ever got more than one or two kills. Quake Live is one of my favorite games of all time but Tribes was on a whole other level.
Back in the day, the maps, abilities, and weapons worked harmoniously. Now, it feels like they don't keep each other in mind while being designed
Apex balances them out well.
@@EraserTraceur nearly every game balances it well. But you have more freedom of choice and alot of players choose the wromg weapon for the engagment
@@maximilianj.gatsby5330 true
@@bobdylan1968 dellusional! HI sucks a bag of moldy dikks.... the story is ass and the MP is a turd....343 are completely incompetent and anyone who supports em is an idiot....
no slayer out of the box? that's base multiplayer! and they couldn;t even implement that? balanced my ass!! GTFO!
There was not balance in all these games lol. "Noob tube" because a phrase for a reason.
I was addicted to Split gate when it came out. The only issue after a couple months was at that point people were getting so good that I couldn't keep up. I didn't have the time being in my upper 30s with kids to commit myself to trying to stay competitive. If I was younger I would've probably stayed into a lot more competitive gaming. I still do competitive gaming but not super serious, it's more just about playing with my friends online than to get a win.
Kinda my issue with modern competitive gaming... People do it as a career now. Fine and all but I'm not looking for that and I don't wanna have to train like an Olympiad just to compete at something that used to just be a fun little hobby.
Kinda feels like wanting to play a casual sport in the park with your friends but finding yourself on a professional pitch.
Maybe I need to git gud... I just feel like I didn't have to play for every waking hour of the day to be gud a decade ago.
I absolutely loved split gate, right up to the day it was released on console and ruined.
I believe the death of arena shooters can be traced to these trends:
1. More cinematic/story driven shooters - Half-Life
2. More console friendly shooter design/regen health - Halo
3. Realistic/Military shooters - COD/Counter Strike
4. Hero shooters - Overwatch
5. Battle royales - Fortnite
I loved one arena shooter as a child, and it was Unreal Tournament. At that age the dark and doom-y corridors of Quake spooked me, so I enjoyed the brighter colors and lighter hallways of Unreal Tournament. I played pretty much every mainline PC game up until Unreal Tournament 3.
Nowadays, I still revisit the old UT games, but for online play, Quake Champions. I made it full circle :)
I started out on quake, but it turned out I was much much better at UT99 😂
If only QC did not have those shitty weapons sounds...in Quake 1 and Q3A, the guns were truly deafening.
I grew up slightly ahead of the arena shooter days, starting from UT2004. Probably still an all time favorite for me given it was my first fps on my first computer (not counting having played quake/doom/wolfenstein on my dads computer as a child). I got really hooked into the scene of competitive quake starting around the end of quake 4 going into quakelive which carried on to be my #1 fav game that I played for nearly 10 straight years. I immediately recognized the instagib ctf map I’d play all the time in unreal tournament from your video pic and knew exactly what this was going to be about. Thanks for stepping some of us older folks back down memory lane. I still attend quakecon every year with my wife!
My first 5 games I've ever played were Diablo II, age of empires, half life 2, UT2004, and Halo 2. I still go back and play those games with my wife
Lawbreakers is to this day one of the most fun shooters I have ever played. The movement mechanics were perfect and the weapon and character variety made it so fun to replay. It's criminal that it didn't survive the way it ought to have
i agree, the game was amazing, movement , gunplay , map design .. crazy high skill ceiling .. everything i wished for i managed to clock 300 hours before it died after like 2 month ..
every day I pray that someone will bring back Lawbreakers
The gameplay of it was actually decent, it should come back at some point.
Yeah lawbreakers had some great ideas. The whip character was amazingly fun. I feel like it could have been an overwatch style game almost but its modes were kind of the letdown imo. That plus the $30 entry fee was too high for most gamers.
@@LevelCapGaming And yet MMORPGs manage to survive, so it must be about more than just money.
Thanks for the spotlight. I grew up with UT and UT2004 then moved onto Halo and nothing has ever really come close to the enjoyment I got out of arena shooters and LAN parties. I was hoping they might make a comeback but might be wishful thinking at this stage
Well, since Epic made the big-brain decision to strip UT from all digital stores... I suspect we may see a resurgence of UT99, once people start sharing it around on the sly. It still runs great, still looks great, still plays great... and it's a lot easier to set up a game with friends for that than any later title.
And damn, the map list available now? I trawled through some of the best quality maps that have been made for the game in the past 20 years, and now my deathmatch list is 600+ entries long.
I'm hoping that when ID software eventually decides to make a proper Quake reboot they will revive the arena shooter genre in the right way. They are the only studio I believe that can do it.
honestly champions ins't bad. No idea what it was like at launch, but now its pretty close to what I wanted from a q3 followup (only downide is its special moves thing.. but that's not as big a deal)
@@billyj.causeyvideoguy7361 It is mid at best. The fact that the stats of the characters are different in terms of speed and health is just stupid and break the games core. Everyone should be on even playing fields, its up to their skill to gather armor, powerups, and weapons to dominate. Its very simple yes but its a beautiful flow, if it aint broke dont fix it. Q champions is ID trying to fix something that was never broken in the first place.
@@soundclock2939 not sure if you are aware, but the characters in quake 3 also had minor stat differences... its quake live that removed all that.
@@soundclock2939 what you want will have no success and no company is throwing money at a quake with better graphics to please some oldschool fans
@@billyj.causeyvideoguy7361 I agree, still, the problem is that now seems a bit too late as sadly just a few hundred active players remain; hell, at this year's QuakeCon there wasn't even any real QC duel... things are starting to slip out
I miss Command and Conquer: Renegade multiplayer, one of the most chaotic and fun games I still ever played. Map control similar to Battlefield conquest with Arena style fighting in pockets around a large map with vehicles and attacking enemies bases to win the game. Was great honestly for a RTS in first person format.
i used to love playing commander on battlefield 2142 when i was too high to shoot. you could really control the battlefield and squads wanted to do what was asked and you could drop them all supplies etc. i could really lose myself in it. then you can zoom into the action too. great fun.
I miss Renegade's marathon servers. Some maps were balanced enough that I could play,log off, come back after work, and still be on the same game. Everyone did it back then, and the communities that grew up around those servers were amazing
RenegadeX is a thing
I'm 22 so I didn't really play arena shooters back in their prime, but I have always enjoyed them, any fast paced movement shooter really. It's a shame that they don't do well nowadays, as they are by far the most fun imo. A fun Quake style arena shooter is Diabotical, very clean and polished, lots of fun.
I love Diabotical but the lack of bots to practice with and lack of players in general makes it a hard sell. I played it a lot before it died out and it truly felt like a perfected and more accessible version of Quake 3
The Epic exclusivity killed Diabotical. In Steam, it would've been able to maintain a much more dedicated playerbase.
I absolutely love movement shooters, titanfall and quake are some of my favourites, I'm still waiting for a decent game like those. Something that has lots of depth in its mechanics, a lot to learn overall that can keep me hooked for hours on end. I adored splitgate, it was a great challenge and offered that depth but everything is just dumbing down movement mechanics which simply makes them less enjoyable. Battlefield and cod being the biggest offenders.
Try Xonotic, it's free
I also hate locking down interactions to on-screen buttons. Adds so much clutter that also harms movement mechanics
Have you tried Ultrakill?
Titanfall movement was great, sadly series got killed on favour of apex legends and apex had to remove a lot of titanfall mechanics
Titanfall also had much lower skill ceiling, you did not need to exploit engine bugs (made feature) to stay competitive as new player
@@Aro666pl I suppose that’s true. Similar to battlefield there are ways to cheese the system and perform well (a wall / spitfire. Tone camping etc), but you could still excel in tap strafing if you want that edge
Pretty much my favorite genre... So many of the games I grew up with. A bit sad they aren't as popular anymore.
I certainly miss the days of the LAN and my obsession with level design at the time. Things were much simpler back in the days of compiling your .bsp . I hope someday we can see a comeback of the deathmatch, instagib and CTF style arena shooters. Hell, the years I spent working on my strafe jumps in Quake 3 on the trick jumping maps, good times...
The skill ceiling likely had a negative impact on this genre. This is a major shame, as being good at Quake and Unreal Tournament provides a rush you just don't get anywhere else. The gameplay of the classics in particular has aged like fine wine. The genre will never make a full return, but it will always have its die-hard fans and it makes me smile when I see studios trying to keep the format going.
It's a shame that LAN multiplayer is almost dead, used to be awesome bringing your rig and hanging out with a bunch of mates and having < 1 ms pings and just fragging for hours in dozens of different games. I used to play UT2004 for a while back in the day and UT3 as well as quake 2 and 3 and Counterstrike. Last year I played the heck out of splitgate for quite a while but haven't been much of a gamer since I have kids and I generally don't have time for games much, and when I do I am usually playing single player or something I can easily walk away from or pause
LAN is dead because it's impossible for young adults and kids to cheat without being caught.
A friend of mine is still running a dedicated server for UT04. At LAN parties, which we still have occasionally, we always make a note to jump into UT04. I remember playing UT 1999 a TON when I was in middle school and high school. I would love a comeback but the reality is, we can still find games if we wanted to. We can message some friends an join a game anytime, a lot of us still do.
So how's a nerd go about getting an invite to that shit? Have FlakCanon will travel? Lol.
A couple years ago I loaded up Unreal Gold and was shocked there were still several servers running. Even found a few people playing that I’d played with 20yrs ago! Major flashback shock after not playing for so long…making me want to reinstall and check it it right now!
I started playing shooters in 1996 and my first MP shooter matches were around that time. To me it is mostly not about the game modes but about the movement and time to kill. So many games today feel slower and have very short TTKs while back in the day, with high speed and longer TTKs it felt like every kill was truly earned.
Modern fps games have such short TTKS so new/bad players can get a few kills by laying prone and hoping the next guy through the door is facing the wrong direction. Same with instakill explosives or easy to use sniper rifles in many new games.
The problem is twofold:
1. Gaming is no longer a "nerd hobby"
The community just isn't there anymore. You used to be able to hop onto any game at any time and talk to everybody on your particular server like you'd known them forever. When voice communication came around, everybody had a microphone and it only got better. Now, the average gamer doesn't care about this. They care about the game as a game and nothing else, the social aspect isn't there unless it's with people that they already know. They just want to shoot bad guys, play the same simulated sports game that they buy every year, etc.
2. Corporatization of video games
This rides off the last bit of the first point. The mainstreamification of video games has caused games to become catered towards the masses, not gamers. They're making games for the largest audience, because that's who they can sell the most copies of a game to. Arena shooters are not mainstream friendly and are definitely not corporate profit maximization friendly.
This is probably why fighting games despite being hard are still around...you only need one other person but for Arena fps well....
@@billyboleson2830 Fighting games are getting easier, but the community is awful (it's like an asylum, especially on fightcade).
7:50 I disagree. Arena shooters are simple on the surface but there’s a lot more depth than at first glance you’re not mentioning at all. They’re far more intricate on a more competitive level than Call of Duty.
oh gosh, thanks LVLCAP for bringing back the needed attention to the best genre ever!
When Quake was released as a playable demo it completely changed gaming. It captivated me beyond any game I had seen previously. Then came Quake 2, Half Life, the mods like CTF and Rocket Arena. Set up LAN parties that became an annual event for a number of years until high speed internet became more common. Unreal Tournament playable demo with 3 maps and set to Instagib was by far the most played game on a few of those LAN parties.
to be fair halo infinites multiplayer got super stale because it launched less than half finished with less than a handful of maps and modes - people dropped it an never bothered to pick it back up. It also has major matchmaking issues for anyone not in the US (can't join games or d-sync) or anyone who's on either extremes of ranking (Unable to find games). It's currently in a downwards spiral where new playas can't join and old playas are getting board which drops the payer count and makes both issues worse.
I'm sure there'd be a market if done right. What I miss most from my Q3 days is the ability to play a quick round, everybody starts fresh, no matter how many hours or dollars somebody spent in the game, the only difference being skill.
One can play a quick round or two and leave. Intense few minutes,. this seems unavailable today, now sessions last much longer and I often don't have the time nor do I wanna spend that much time on games in a row as is being demanded these days.
You know what i miss?
Time Splitters
Thanks for making me feel old af. I think you pretty well nailed it. Arena shooters became stepping stone for more complex game design. As a more casual gamer today, ex hardcore gamer I think the speed and competition make it hard for people like me to enjoy.
I feel like the old Direct X9 graphics of UT2004 have a crisp simplicity to them that's lost to modern flashy graphics, and also has locked in solid movement and gun play mechanics on fun and interesting maps. Miss those days.
Great video and very relatable. I'm a Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Unreal and later Quake 3 and UT99, UT2003 and UT2004 kid. Played some Counter-Strike (also at school lol) and later CoD in 2003, but I was totally hooked on Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Still the best shooter imo. I shifted more towards CoD in 2005 when CoD2 came out and got hooked on CoD4. Haven't played CoD3 at that time, because I was more of a PC Gamer back then. UT3 was indeed a very nice game, but had no players really fast. I also played the latest UT from Epic, Lawbreakers, Quake Champions, Toxikk, Splitgate and I liked all those games, but they had no player base or couldn't keep my interest that long.
Last year I was more into Halo Infinite and lately I'm Valorant and continuous MW2.
If Lawbreakers would come back, I would definitely play it. I would really like to see Treyarch or Infinity Ward give it a go with a game in the Halo Univserse. Maybe like hundreds of years after Master Chief or something like that.
I was introduced to FPP shooters genre with Heretic and Duke Nukem 3D but my first online arena shooter experience was Unreal Tournament - from day one as it was introduced in late 1999. All I needed to enter the world of death-dealing and flag-stealing was a Pentium II 233 with a Voodoo Graphics card and a 33.6K modem. It was wild! And guess what, the very same demo I used to play in 1999, installed from literally the same gaming magazine CD I got it from back then, still worked online up until January of 2023!
This is bullshit. Arena shooters are not just a stepping stone and they aren't outdated and arena shooters are still around most of them are unfortunately just single player games now but I still have hopes that someone will come around make a great multiplayer arena shooter again I love unreal tournament and I still play it to this day
I went from being a proper ut99 ctf player to a regular gaming Andy playing all sorts of trash. Talking about a step down bro . We are barely hanging on here … lets pray to the gaming gods that PoE2 is gonna be something. It is like going from pure Crystal meth to sniffing trashclan glue. 😅😅😅
Facing Worlds in UT with low grav playing CTF was so amazing. So many great memories, but I can remember how frustrating it was when someone would “beep” in and knock me off the internet lol.
Takes me back. I still recall getting a demo disc from a gaming magazine that had UT04 on it. played the hell out of it until a year later when I had my first job and got it. Hell, I recall the original steam with the tan background.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy to think about what Steam was like when it first launched versus what it eventually became. I don't believe there were even 3rd-party games on it for like the first 18-24 months it was around or something like that. It didn't even have a search feature until a couple years after that. Wild how the times change.
Haha I remember those demo discs! And before that it was shareware demo versions of games on like 5 floppy discs lol
@@boblee6101 I definitely remember the multiple floppy disk days as well 🤣
@@canman87 kids these days have no idea 😆
You touched on a lot of what I would have said as an explanation for why that particular style of FPS fell by the wayside. I've been playing FPS games on PC since Wolfenstein 3D came out, so I was fortunate to be right in the thick of it in terms of the rise and fall of the arena shooter. I have vivid memories of playing and watching others play Quake, Unreal Tournament, and Counterstrike (obviously not an arena shooter, but I'll get to that) throughout the latter half of my childhood. DOOM multiplayer was probably the progenitor for this style of FPS, although by the time I was a bit more aware of what was going on it had been supplanted by the aformentioned titles.
If I had to offer a summary of what happened, it's that gaming changed A LOT from 1995-2005 both technologically as well as with the kind of games that were being made. Arena shooters were more or less a product of their time and what was possible with those earlier FPS engines, but players were looking for more as things started progressing and allowing for more intricate and (possibly arguably) fulfilling styles of gameplay. Half-Life and its various mods probably represent the flash point from which the next evolution in FPS games began. In terms of multiplayer, Counterstrike really redefined what was possible for the genre, even more so than base Half-Life; and here we are almost 25 years later, where the game has seen a number of rereleases and still has one of the most active communities in gaming.
Arena shooters were a lot of fun, but I don't think they'll have a resurgence in any meaningful capacity. Outside of the non-Warzone COD games of the world and the odd TDM mode in any given game, simply running around and fragging people isn't really that satisfying for most people these days when they have so many other options for games that offer more substantial experiences. It's like giving a young person these days an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, or something from the pre-NES/Genesis era; they likely wouldn't "get it" because they didn't grow up with those games and in general they haven't held up by modern standards particularly well. They might play with them for a bit, but I expect they'd be looking for something else to do before long at all. And I can't really blame them for that, lol. Why play Combat or Archon (one of my favorites on the C64, for the record) when they can play the latest Mario or Zelda game?
Bit of a tangent, but hopefully it made sense 😅
This argument would've held up if TDM wasn't the most popular gamemode in FPS games. Even now, every large BR game has a TDM mode because people like running around and fragging that much.
I wouldn't say so much it's the game modes, so much as the skill gap problem. The big advantage that more grounded games like CS or CoD have over arena shooters is that anyone can get some lucky shots and get a kill. Play some CoD and even if you're awful you'll at least get some kills. In an Arena shooter you'll just get smoked, because keeping up with the fast paced gameplay becomes almost entirely a matter of who has the best game mechanics. You have no real options in an arena shooter where as in CoD, if the other guy has better reflexes you can try camping, or hiding in corners, laying prone and surprising him, etc. And that can get you some cheap kills. But with Arena shooters there's no good counter to that.
Even some of the modern games that take from arena shooters, like overwatch, have things like auto aim turrets that help weaker mechanical players handle people with lightning fast movement skills, so there's some ways to deal with mechanically being outclassed. In a game like Quake, you're pretty much screwed because the "bounce around like a frog on crack" playstyle has no counterplay beyond just being better at it than the other guy.
@@taragnor well said. However I think the rabbit hole goes deeper. I think it also has to do with the rise of eSports and marketability of the game via competitive play. While arena shooters will make great eSports games, they lack the marketability due to the factor you mentioned.
@@spinyslasher6586 Yeah esports is tricky. You need something with enough skill to be interesting to watch, to let pro players show off their skills, but also with enough mainstream appeal that it can generate a casual playerbase such that the game makes a name for itself. In the case of some hardcore games like Starcraft 2, there was a really good single player campaign which could draw in casual players. And really even in spite of that Starcraft was largely replaced by more mainstream games like League of Legends.
But as an e-sport I feel like if you don't have at least a little mainstream appeal, it's hard to get any kind of esports traction in the long term, because the game always just ends up as an elitist game for pros only. And it's much harder to connect with a game as an e-sport if you haven't played it yourself at least in some capacity. The most successful e-sports aren't necessarily the most high skill games, but they tend to be ones with a lot of casual appeal.
I think this is another area Arena shooters kind of dropped the ball. You don't really see many of them try to go for single player appeal at all. Unlike Doom or original Quake which had whole single player campaigns you could play, but as arena shooters seemed to develop, less and less effort was put into the single player game, and they became multiplayer only (sometimes with bots for offline play). And really if they go that route, they need to either be flexible on the skill-gap issue, like how Overwatch has a bunch of low-skill abilities like auto aim turrets, or they end up rapidly failing to get traction like Quake Champions.
@@taragnor I think the big appeal for Overwatch and other hero-based games are those ultimate abilities. While a pro-player can use these abilities at their highest potential, it allows casual players to look forward to something that can basically be a 'free kill' button.
I agree with the sentiment of skill ceiling issues. The last thing as a dev that you want is to make your new players feel alienated like they need to study a master's degree in your game before they can even remotely stand a chance in the game. Back in the 90s due to the fact that getting games was more difficult it meant that people wanted to squeeze as much enjoyment out of a game as possible and had time to learn.
But in our modern Era like... if I'm not having fun in one game literally nothing is stopping me from opening another game. Hence why some more high skill ceiling games like Titanfall 2 is now almost dead with a small player base. Nothing stopped those players from just playing a different game if they didn't want to spend hours learning grapple hook tech on each map just to have a chance at having an even match. Some of course do. But not everyone. It's why even fighting games are losing popularity. An inability to draw in new audiences without the hard-core fan base who took that master's degree getting upset at them losing their advantage.
Yes.
These games suck, because of the veterans, the full of egoist toxic moron competitive factor killed the genre.
I see this in Quake Champion too. Pro players smurfing TDM, killing the fresh players.
In real, no one want to fuk with 'pros', some players want to get fun after work in casual, and in the same skill lvl.
They must rework the whole system, and give a skill based lobby, or separate the veteran shit from the casuals, because atm cannot get players.
Its boring to get a match every 10min, where 4 man dominate the arena 75/25.
There are much better games out there, where the player can have fun.
The mod community for Unreal Tournament 2004 was craaaazy
I'm 36, I played the arena shooter at it's peak. It was amazing. Today, every time I get on something that fast pace, I become shat on with a quickness. I simply don't have the speed and dexterity. No matter how good you think you are, there's a 14 in Singapore that will beat you every time. Despite loving these games in my youth, today I get destroyed my 7 year olds. For me SBMM would have to be strong for me to ever get back into this genre.
I'm the same age. Tested my reaction times a decade ago and they were 200 ms. Now they are 300 ms. Everything that happens, happens to me a whole tenth of a second faster than it ought to.
damn bro im 17 i wish i lived or got to experience this game's prime. ur lucky u got to experience this masterpiece
@@issaramzi. It wasn't all it was cracked up to be. New Zealand internet was pretty shoddy in the early 2000's, only one computer in our family could have it at a time, and I spent a lot of time playing multiplayer maps by myself imagining what it would be like playing them with other people.
@@ingolifs Dude that's not normal at all, you should get yourself checked. You are 36 not 63. Reaction time does barely change with age. I just did a quick test and scored 170 ms. I remember it used to be around 190 ms years ago but the improvement can be explained by lower latency hardware. Same age btw.
I think a games popularity these days is sadly influenced to much by big streamers,, when shroud, drdisrespect, summit etc try a game the numbers jump massively when they stop the numbers drop. Also the fact that the majority of FPS gamers think shroud is the FPS god and they see he is absolute trash and gets farmed in arena shooters puts players off. Quake for example is too hard for most players and compare that to games like CoD, Battlefield, overwatch where it is easy to be top of the leader board they would rather choose those, simply because they don't have to put the work in to get results.
Quake if you don't grind and get good you are perma dead on spawn, even if the skill gap between 2 players in a duel is very small you are still gonna get farmed. you need to keep mental timers in your head for armor/health, you need to have very fast reactions and precise aim while moving fast. on top of that movement itself is a mechanic that a new players find hard lol.
I wouldn't say Doom is dead a ton of people played doom 2016 and Eternal.
There is a new quake being made currently, i hope people will suck it up and play it long enough to actually improve and give the game a chance when it releases.
Yep.
Dr. Disrespect tried Quake Champions, enjoyed it, the player count spiked for a day but he immediately decided it'd be too much work to be good at it so he dropped it.
Now Gianni Matragrano (pro voice actor, voices Gabriel in Ultrakill) streams QC every friday. Streamed the first one on YT, called it "Fraggy Friday", single-handedly shot the player count up tenfold because in his words "people are looking for permission to play". I hop on all the time, it's still fun, you can still get matches quick.
We don't actually know if there's a new Quake being developed, just rumors.
I tried playing Doom 2016 deathmatch a few time recently but without a server browser or at least an active player count I had no idea how long it would take to find a match or what to queue for to improve my chances. I waited for like 25mins and no match on PC feelsbad
@@RabidChasebot The loss of real server browsers is the single worst tragedy in online gaming.
@@colbyboucher6391 Gianni Matragrano sounds like someone who knows what's up, giving people a space where they feel they can just play. No need to do well or grind, no pressure to go pro or be the next hit Twitch streamer, just to play in the most enjoyable sense of the word.
I've seen similar reactions to fighting games, RTS, and I expect it's related to why some people are just scared of playing games to begin with. Broadly a fear of failure, that quite frankly is common everywhere AFAICT, and more narrowly that in the 90s and early 00s there wasn't really an Esports scene. Yes you had MLG and WCG doing events, but it wasn't anything like it is now, it wasn't really the focus of multiplayer games the way it is now.
It's always hard to struggle and learn to get into a game, to lose 20 games in a row, but it's especially hard when there's this pervasive sense that your play is something of a job interview, and that if you don't play well right now you just shouldn't play at all. It makes it nearly impossible to just enjoy the movement, the spectacle, the little victories you get as you master the game, and the fun accidents that you can't help but laugh at, when all of that is overshadowed by feeling like you have to win or you have to leave, because if you're not gonna go pro why play at all.
Ahhh yes... Quake III Arena. I was 5 or 6 when i played it the first time. I ran around empty padman levels. It was fun.
i am so glad i experienced the golden era of arena shooters and LAN parties.
starting with Quake1 and stuck with Q3A for so many years, rocking the german and european CTF scene
it was a blast
I'd argue Halo 2 coming out is what killed arena shooters. As for a revival? Well, eSports has never been hotter so it may slot in there but it'll never be as big as it was. Shame as I have such fond memories of it.
Doom Eternal's multiplayer was extremely unique and well-designed, but people didn't engage with it... seems like most people basically didn't even give it a chance, which feels like a shame to me.
It's just how things are now. Titanfall's multiplayer was the same, adored by a few (including me) for the speed, the movement and the skill involved beyond twitchy reflexes but that put lots of people off.
These days FPS games are obsessively optimised for balance and competitive play - because streamers and esports bring the big money - which means they can't focus on unpredictable physics engines, random weapon spawns or wacky movement. It's too random and hard to predict for the pro players (who definitely aren't in it for the fun, and aren't fun to play with) and we can't have little Timmy giving up because he can't master the janky rocket jump before spending dad's cash on a dozen skins
I started gaming in 2011, a little late for the peak of arena shooters, but I still had the opportunity to play games like Tribes: Ascend and some Quake for a couple hundred hours each and I loved them! TF2 and Overwatch are two games that wear their movement-based arena shooter influence on their sleeve and that's why I still play them after years and years. I just always want to go fast while shooting people🤣
I say, Team Fortress 2 really does feel like it has the same sort of appeal as the original arena shooters did. The series does have Quake DNA coursing through its veins, after all. Do wish there was more hint of Unreal in it though, but the most we could count on that would probably be in some promo item. But since the window of opportunity to do that with UT4 has long passed, I don't think that will happen.
@@sulphurous2656 I'm still praying for another true Tribes game. Add some good background lore/story, emphasis the classes as fun characters with personality, and keep the insane skiing mechanics and giant ctf maps! I doubt it'll ever happen though, the skill floor for most arena shooters is too high for most casual players and they simply don't work on console from my experience
I remember being 13 back in 1998 when my mom said she'd get the hardware to let me game on the PC. The PC was a new 400mhz Pentium 3, which wasnt bad back then. I stuck a VooDoo3 3000 gfx card in it. I remember getting the 3000 instead of the 2000 because the 3000's box advertised "3D gameplay at 60fps" lol. I went home with that card and Unreal that day - best birthday ever, because it was the only point in time when my family could afford to get me anything like it. The arena shooters looked ad played like a dream on that rig. I found myself playing more GTA and GTA2 than anything though back then, introducing me to making mods.
V3 3000 came out in 1999. 98 was still the Voodoo2 era. I had 2 of the V2 12 megs in SLI and those things utterly destroyed UT at 100+ FPS lol.
@@JathraDH - in many cases a SLI Voodoo2 setup was still faster than Voodoo3, at least the 2000 and 3000 models. Hell, within the recommended UT specs, a Pentium II 233-300, a single Voodoo2 was as fast as a Voodoo3, let alone SLI which carried that performance over to 1024x768.
@@JathraDH - also, the story makes sense. They got the PC in 1998 (P II 400 launched almost exactly a year before Voodoo3) and then they stuck a Voodoo3 in it so it couldn't come with one from the factory.
@@spavatch I suppose if you think that it was an upgrade and not originally bought with the PC it makes sense yea.
voodoo 3 was the king. Later I've paired it with the new celeron 533 overclocked to 950mhz out of the box and beat the shit out of any pentium 4! :D
These were the games my friends older siblings would play when I was over at their house playing Pokemon or Mario. I've gotten really enamored with them in the last few years, and even though I'm not very good at them there's something really mesmerizing about the endless fragging and crazy strafe jumping, the edgy futuristic arenas and weapons and the hypnotic late 90s rock and electronica. A large part of it is probably nostalgia, but to me it's like a pure distillation of everything that action games are about, and playing a round of deathmatch in QL, UT99 or Xonotic is an adrenaline rush like no other.
It's not nostalgia, my friend. It's transcendent truth. : >
How did you get through this entire video without ever mentioning the fact that UT4 was mechanically essentially complete, played like an absolute dream, and then was just completely abandoned in favor of Fortnite? *That* is why the arena shooter is dead: because the developers of one of arguably the most well-known arena shooter franchise in history made it all the way to the finish line, and then said "hmm... nah." I will never forgive them for that. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and condemning an entire genre in the process.
I think the biggest issue is the skill-ceiling / gap / matchmaking. The only way to get into arena shooters back then was to endure hours upon hours of ownage until you got "good enough". People that got into it a few years earlier had a huge advantage to any newcomer (and still have today). Nowadays everyone expects to jump into a new game and be able to win in a few rounds. That's not happening with arena shooters. They look simple from the outside but are way more complicated than more "sophisticated looking" games. And there is just no reason to release new ones because the genre already reached perfection back in 2000-2010
I am not so sure of that actually, because if you were to design a new arena shooter in this day and age you would also implement skill based match making etc. If you pick the older CoD titles that relied on P2P matchmaking you could often have blow out scores like 60-1 because SBMM was not in play, this al changed with matchmaking and dedicated servers.
True that in the old days you had to endure hours of being destroyed. Nowadays kids expect to win after 3 games.
@@BertM3 The problem with skill based matchmaking is, it only works if the playerbase is big enough and the ratings are well balanced. Usually, the game is long dead before the playerbase even gets big enough or calibrated for good matchmaking to kick in. It's why all the existing indie- (and AAA tbh) arena shooters are kinda dead. because there's a small elite playing them, and everyone else has no way to enter.
The problem with this genre is they cannot do a system what separate the casual and the veteran player.
Quake Champions suck in the boot...
I see the toxic retarded egoist morons 24/7 always, so this makes sense, they dominate in 85%percent of the game time.
SO if I enter playing after work for 3hours, from that 3 hour minimum 2 I playing with those mofos.
Thats why this franchise suck in nutshell...
Another big hit the tutorials missing for circle jump, strafe jump, rocket jump, momentum, aimskill tests, maps, server browser
SO this in nutshell giving the big FUK YOU from a casual player...
Good luck guys if you want to play on a desert with 1k players...
@@madpew Problem with Skill based match making is that you never really get to a point where it feels like you have improved as a player, sure. objectively you will have (hopefully) improved, but in terms of how the matches feel to play, there is no real difference, with dedicated servers and no skill based match making, sure you would be curb stomped in the beginning and be at the bottom of the leaderboard, but as you learned and improved you could actually see and feel tangible improvement, especially if you played with roughly the same core group
what i remember hearing from someone, is that the core has gone so small that only the hardcore are the most active. but otherwise it shouldn't be hard to play afps because they're fundamentally just walk and shoot + the emphasis is more on resources management
Yes, my generation gave the world the true MP scene. Original Yellow Disc Counter Strike, Ricochet, DOOM , Quake, UT99, and even better..... Teamspeak/Ventrillo/Gamespy and one of my favorites for a long time RTCW/Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Starcarft 1/Brood War online was awesome. Diablo 1/2+LOD Awesome. We understood the true value of friendship by gibbing and our hearts became strong, full of love, and lead/energy/unknown matter. And that was when my dad got Dial up AOL so we had either phone time/playtime.... or .... back when the 2mbps connection router from NY RoadRunner Internet came around and we didn't need to deal with that. OMG, was so huge . Children who play now will never know that as they jump onto discord and play. Imagine, only texting in game.... learning to type and slaughter simultaneously... and that was it. Arena shooters are still capable of staying with everyone, let's just give them the VR jump!
My parents switching from dial-up to broadband a few months after UT99 was released, was nothing short of a miracle.
Going from 250-300 ping to
*Please don't read this with a snarky or angry voice. I didn't write it with either. Just my thoughts, but I realize it might come off that way.
Arena shooters didn't die because they were an outdated concept. They died because they are incredibly difficult to play on console effectively, and from 2005 until about 2010 (maybe 2011) AAA publishers and developers abandoned PC (particularly of note is Epic). In the early 00's where Unreal Tournament and Quake were doing great on PC, their console counterparts suffered (and there were many attempts to get those IPs on consoles). The mobility, speed, and accuracy required to play an arena shooter in its purest form is not compatible with a controller. That remains true to this day. The only reason Halo survived is because it was built from the ground up to be played on console. Halo is slower than a traditional arena shooter, and low grav makes it easier to hit targets as they move through the air. Halo was clowned by PC players as a nerfed arena shooter. (Please don't hate on me, I do actually enjoy Halo and always have)
That's why they died, but the reason they won't come back is because today's players are used to being spoon fed kills and wins. Overwatch is an extreme example (though the best one I can think of right now), but fairness, competitiveness, and balance all take a backseat to the idea the player should feel good about playing, whether or not they are doing a good job. Negative feedback is suppressed while positive feedback in increased, regardless of how effective the player is being. That ideology is something that should be left for single player, not a competitive multiplayer shooter, imo. This is one of the reasons I think players have such a hard time getting better at a games these days.
With Arena shooters negative feedback is immediate and harsh. In most cases, there is no one else to blame but yourself (unless you think the other person is "cheating"). With the exception of hardware, players are on a completely level playing field in an Arena shooter. Realizing you lost an engagement because you got outplayed is a hard pill to swallow.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
P.S. I miss the 2K4CTF Community.
Arena shooters share the same issue with Base Building RTS games (like C&C and Battle for Middle Earth), they are one trick ponies. That's not to say they aren't amazing. They are usually so well designed that it puts AAA games to shame. Sadly they don't get the consistent player base as the game is usually focused on 1 thing
My dude, I was there for the entire evolution of the FPS genre, from Wolfenstein 3-D through DooM and everything which followed.
There was never a better time in gaming than the height of the arena shooter, which peaked with Unreal Tournament 2004, and there hasn't been a better time for FPS gaming since. Hell, I still go back to play the classics like Quake and UT99 regularly just because there hasn't been anything better made since. Sure, the graphics have been improved in many ways, but there's just nothing to replicate the essence, passion and soul of those top-tier arena shooters anymore.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go kill Xan Kriegor on Godlike difficulty again.
I hear you, and the community is still live in Doom 2016 multiplayer and Quake Champions. These are fantastic arena shooters worth your time today.
@@jamesvella Quake Champions is more of the grindy gacha loot box RNG bullshit they replaced our good shooters with. At least DooM Eternal has some good content.
@@TheRealSkeletor Yeah I spend a great deal of time in Quake Champions, I dont bother with loot however. I was thinking about buying Doom Eternal, do you play the multiplayer? I was wondering if it got better since I seen it has deathmatch now and the only reason I didnt buy it from the start was I only want to play Deathmatch (not the battlemode)
@@jamesvella I've done the 2v1 vs. Battlomode, but I haven't tried Deathmatch in DooM Eternal yet.
The arena shooter spirit still lives in FFA and TDM. Modes that remain popular
Lmao no that isn't the "arena shooter spirit" at all and that's part of the problem, people don't get how deep these games can go.
Shitty mindless FFA lobbies were always the worst part.
@@colbyboucher6391 you can avoid that shity ffa... in discord is community that make balance friendly matches and also draft cup tournaments..
I think omitting 343's and Microsoft's failures in developing and delivering halo games after bungie equates to not giving the games a fair shake in this video. Myself and many people I know want halo infinite to succeed but month after month there continues to be no meaningful development, just backtracking on promises in favor of greedy monetization or core features of previous titles being delivered incomplete and delayed far behind expectations
I grew up with Arena Shooters and CS 1.6 / Source. I also played other genres regularly but FPS was my best field also because of my insane reaction and my love for precision. I also think that the time is simply over for very simplistic games like these, but naturally there will always be gamers that come back to them. The raw skill, the fast, rythmic, trance like gaming sessions are just something different and offer an uncomplicated experience. In 2013 Nadeo launched Shootmania, a clean e-sportsy Arenashooter with looots of different (custom) modes. I was tryharding Trackmania for a while back then, and I was there right at the beginning of SM. I was completely hooked and after some months I was part of the creme de la creme in 2 of the game modes. Unfortunately it was already a gamble to bring out a new arena shooter at that time, and combined with a few bad decisions by the developers it died very, very fast. After focussing more on RTS games in the last years, I come back to SM every now and then for casual fun with the last remaining nerds ^^.
you know, i`m not an old fan that played Quake and Unreal Tournament back in the day but when i discovered the Arena FPS, i fell in love with it, i love the fast paced movement of Arena FPS games and i play old Unreal Tournament and Splitgate, but seeing this fall of the genre gives me an absolute heartbreak because it is a genre that deserves more atention
halo infinite was the closest we had to a comeback. the gaming community at large wanted it to be good, but a bad launch and a mediocre live support content drip led to the current player numbers.
I like to think that there will be a new arena shooter that will come out and be super cool, good, and unique, but we'll have to wait and see.
That little retro-FPS boom that was trendy among indy devs after the release of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal was probably the closest thing we'll have to a retro-FPS/arena shooter revival. It was a trend for a few short years, then it fizzled out shortly after Doom Eternal's release.
I played 100s of hours of Doom16 multiplayer. Perfect blend of fun, movement, not too serious etc. Eternal not having classic deathmatch killed it for me.
The skill ceiling is also an issue for new gamers. I played Quake Champions not that long ago for the first time, and I got absolutely destroyed, over and over again. And let me tell you: I fucking loved it! Reminded me of when i got into multiplayer FPS as a kid, and getting that first 1v1 frag and then the first win feels so god damn earned. Issue is, many new gamers are so used to playing bots and getting feed wins early now they never got to experience what it takes to actually good good at a game. My boss talked me into playing Fortnite, and I won my first 10 games, but as im playing and destroying these "players" i start to realize that those are actually bots. Same with COD lobbies. If a new player boots up a game and gets destroyed over and over again, they don't try to get better anymore, they just call it a bullshit game and uninstall. The companies do it for one simple reason; if a player thinks they are good at a game, they will stay for the dopamine. If they stay long term in the game, the easier it is to justify buying battle passes or skins.
Its sad, but its the reality of the world now. However, 500 players is still enough to regularly get games, and ussually the players in games like that are much less toxic. Never experienced a more friendly community in gaming that the quake community. Sure they still have toxic players, but they also have dudes that will destroy you in ranked 1v1, and then add you as a friend and give you pointers. Thats not rare either, its extremely common in games like that.
Unreal Tournament was my jam back in the day!
UT99 and games like them are never coming back. Fact is, one player if skilled enough can wipe the entire other team with zero deaths if they're just casual players. It might be an adrenaline rush for the skilled player to take on an entire team solo, but it's just utter humiliation for casual players. It's why games like Halo that essentially used the same formula but slowed down to 25% speed and with lots of explosive weapons that forgo the need for aiming gained so much popularity.
Thats a fact yeah. Tbf I would love to see some of the best PC FPS players from valorant, csgo, apex, and whatever in an Unreal Tournament match. That would be sick to watch
All first person shooters that have multiplayer maps are arena shooters.... from quake to counterstrike to call of duty to battlefield; they are all arena shooters, just different size and esthetics.
I doubt they will make a comeback, but I really want to see the arena shooter make one
Golden era for these arena shooters meant a hundred people playing at any one time... They have not lost popularity as far as I can tell...
Having to explain a LAN party is wild
Q3A 1vs1 was really a unique thing. Graphics turned all the way down and zero textures for maximum frame rate, customised FOV... I loved it so much.
2:45 - no, at ping 300 FPS were unplayable. I remeber that times very well