The arena fps genre laid the ground work for shooters as a whole and created some of the best gaming experiences ever to be created. Despite this, arena fps games have taken a back seat to their younger brother, tactical shooters. Why has this happened? In this video I take a look at a couple games from the arena fps genre and their design choices that may have led to this downfall.
Sorry this took months to upload. Promise it won't take as long next time hehe
Twitch: / skeleblood
Discord: / discord
Instagram: / skeleblood
TikTok: / skeleblood
BLOODKAST: / @bloodkast
Second channel: / @skelebloo
Mid video
MIDEO
@@isbibbi Schmideo.
@@CheezMonsterCrazy Shmiqeo?
Bideo
@@skelebloodno mention of unreal tournament which is abandonware and therefore easy to find, has a player base due to being maintained by the community, and is extremely easy to get into with single player campaign ladders utilizing some of the best competitive AI ever acting as an interactive tutorial 👀
It’s crazy to me how Quake 3 still looks like the fastest, craziest competitive FPS to watch after all this time. I loved playing Q3A back in the day but the skill ceiling definitely got out of control for me as someone who had a busy life. It was FUN when everybody was exploring the mechanics simultaneously. It stopped being fun when an unflinching meta had been discovered and it was honed razor sharp by players with the most time. But all competitive FPS games have that “problem” which is why I don’t play them anymore. Just too busy. But I’m grateful I got to be there when the genre was first really taking off :)
Yep, people complaining about Arena FPS being dead forget that when Arena FPS was actually popular, nobody played to the meta, and maybe 1% of the population played Duel at best. People barely even played FFA and TDM. The entire casual audience spent all their time in non-competitive custom game modes like Instagib, Freeze Tag, Zombies, and a quaint little mod known as… Team Fortress.
I was there to started with FPS games when they first came out by the time Quake 3 came around wow that was super nuts... By that point I had a career I didn't have the free time to really polish any level of skill. My attempts playing in hyper active arenas was really reminiscent of Smash TV... but I was one of the millions of enemies who was just getting obliterated. If you ever played Smash TV you understand the metaphor as soon as you spawn you might get to choose the location but you'd become nothing more than red paint almost instantly.. solo against a few bots was better for me
All these games are scattered all over the place now with so many different versions of the same games. Imho I think that Quake Live is a way worse version of Q3 but then who is going to play Q3A nowaday anyway? But then, now what just came out, a remaster of Quake 2 it's nice but once again it's another version of the same game, how can you expect to keep a constant player base if you get so many versions of the exact same games 🤔
Plus a lot of servers are filled with aimbots since the late 2000s
@@Marc-vt1jh facts! ;)
I was always an Unreal Tournament player. Spent so much time in my teens back in 1999-2006 playing UT99 and then UT2k4. Really wish there was a way to bring these back and make them popular again.
I played a unreal tournament 99 and 2004 more then any other game. I've never played CS or quake besides 4 and wars. The Unreal franchise will always be better in my opinion. I can go back and play it over and over with getting tired. I played unreal games when I was like 6 or so
Epic killed UT. They were making a new UT but then abandoned the team.
Thanks to Fortnite...@@TheWehzy
@@TheWehzy Billion dollar company yet they apparently couldn't afford to at least keep a skeleton crew working on UT4 or keep the official server or storefronts up for their flagship title. Amazing.
Fully-charged Impact Hammer up Sweeney's for this nasty dick move.
I'm super sad (as an old UT player) that the new UT never really took off. It was meant to be THE arena shooter experience, and it got derailed so much...
I really enjoyed fortnite but it meant that unreal tournament would be sent to an early grave... Unfortunate cause i was messing around with unreal tournament 3 around 2018 and i was excited to see ut4.... Oh man....
Doom 2016 and eternal both missed the opportunity to bring back arena shooters. Used to love unreal tournament as a kid. Unreal tournament 3 on PS3 was bang on
Just 2 things to add:. getting rid of dedicated (community hosted) servers was a big part that made those games worse. Another problem with the extreme skill ceiling in those games was/is that those skills (once learned) can easily be transferred to another game. So while the first few games had a chance of building a community where everyone got better at the same or similar pace, every new release is SWARMED with quake-pros that obliterate everyone trying out a NEWLY released arena shooter. This leads to a big barrier for a community to break leading to mostly dead games, where the same pros battle it out, while everyone else moves on to find a safespace from those said pros.
Those two issues feed into each other. Clan Arena is a pretty casual mode for Quake, and sure there are skilled players in it, but the general way you'd play Quake for the longest time was in big lobbies, just messing around. Removing community servers, and using rank systems ensures you're always just having a horrible experience if you're trying to learn or play more casually. Quake wasn't some kind of pro only game until it was made that way.
What I find particularly irritating is players at the top of their game fully advocating for new players to be put into stompfests against massively more experienced players (mostly by removing skill-based matchmaking) with arguments like "they will never get better at the game otherwise" and "it's unfair for good players to never be able to relax without risking to lose their ranking". First: how does getting stomped repeatedly without understanding what you did wrong a good way to learn anything and get better? Second: do you really like the game itself, or do you only enjoy stomping new players because it makes you feel good? Since the comparison to fighting games was made, there is rarely any situation in this type of game where you can die without understanding what happened, and you can actually see clearly what the opponent did and start learning from it. Analyzing your opponent's actions is exceedingly harder in a shooter.
@@f145hr3831jr The reason why pros and streamers say this is because most of them are too young or too brain crushed to remember server list. It’s a much better way to do matchmaking for all skill levels, and sure you can have a ranked mode as well, but generally allowing people to develop a feel for the game before throwing them in ranked or rank-less mm is better.
also the sense of community, because you could join a server and just spectate the players while chatting with the playersand other spectators.. while u wait for a spot to join in. now its just "oh jump into this 10 minute match, then go through 3 loading screens while u queue up for the next"
Also Quake did best thing changed history forever! 2 australian student created Quake mod called: Quake: Team Fortress 1996. This mod was masterpiece and all quake servers was playing this % 50 Half of the game. Second: Quake engine taked by valve software and created goldsource engine... i mean thats why Quake is very important changed world forever.
It’s funny to how Halo gets so much crap for supposedly killing arena shooters yet counter strike seems to always get off Scott free in this discussion when I’d argue it did more damage to afps then halo ever did.
You are onto something. Tho i ever hardly played Halo so can't comment on how popular it became at that time .
@@KaraokeNig Halo 2 invented modern matchmaking (Halo's real sin I think) and Halo 3 was, in the U.S., one of the best-selling games ever only to be surpassed by CoD 4 soon after. I still remember being so sad realizing that most people liked CoD more. I saw the future.
Halo is also arguably the closest thing to an AFPS that still has mainstream appeal and was singlehandedly carrying the entire genre from 2007 (after UT3 flopped) to 2015 (Doom remake).
I'd say it's moreso just console gaming on its own.
cs is trash since they removed bhop :D
Oldschool cometitive genres (arena FPS, fighting, RTS) suffer from one 'flaw': high skill ceiling coupled with breakneck speed - something unappoachable by casuals. Also, most were individual based, while the focus shifted to teams in modern times (to share the responsibility).
Just came here to comment this. Too high skill ceiling for noobs is what killed the genre.
Fighting games and RTS still enjoy major success, though RTS has been eclipsed by it's son MOBA which as you said So I don't really get your point, truthfully only FPSes had this issue, which is quite sad. Teams are fun though, it works well. TDM was a mode that can exist within an Arena FPS.
@@spaz113z Skill Floor more like it.
@@augustcederberg5904 What is that supposed to mean? Naturally there were other factors too but I'm talking specifically about arena shooters not RTS or fighting games.
CTF is best though IMO
and another thing is in arena shooters (like in fighting games) players could express themselves in way that you actually will remember their nickcname and when they pop in your game later on you'd be like "oh no that guy's trouble"
Very true
Counter-Strike for instance is full of player-expression and style, thriving while fighting games (Street Fighter for instance) is suffering from the same characters and meta + pro players bitching about the game in Twitter. Mostly a NA thing. Let's say Quake and other Arena shooters made a comeback and they would be as popular as CS or LoL. I guarantee there would be constant bitching about mechanics, balancing and other stuff in Twitch / Twitter while EU / Asia would be dominating the scene as usual.
@@5uomalainen tbh when quakelive was popping off and still had tournaments around '09 '10 ( i think ) there was alot of bitching on ESR about spawn points, map rotations, item placement, weapon dmg output xD
I still remember some names from early TF2
yes I still remember going up against "KikeKiller1488" in Quake 3 Arena
I feel bad that Unreal Tournament wasn't mentioned I know epic games removed it from... Everywhere, but that game kinda tackled the issues Quake has with more team oriented gamemodes Blitz especially is a type of gamemode that's very easy to understand and very hard to master, and because it's a team oriented gamemode you're not locked on specific options and instead have and execute plans as a team
I was also surprised, how can one talk about these games and do not mention the very best one. I would say the 2004 was a pinnacle of them all, after that, only worse titles came
Yeah. Where the hell is Unreal Tournament? I would even go so far as to say that UT99 blew Quake 3 out of the water in a ton of respects, and to not mention it is both a major disservice to the game and a major gap in the video's explanations.
@@restoreleader Flak Monkey :)
I had the same thought. UT4 is extremely fun. He only really mentioned Quake until the end of the video. Tribez was another really good one that people forgot about.
Yeah , why … i am too think UT Is the best arena online fps , I even play it from time to time ..there are some people still playing
No Unreal Tournament mentioned :( (The developer ACTUALLY murdered it)
Surprised you didn't mention tribes when discussing unintended movement techniques and the dev responses. Such a classic tale of player driven development.
Yeah tribes was also pretty cool. I am still sad that Tribes 3 never really took off. It had alot of really cool ideas but it could not attract many new players and the old players were pissed that it was not tribes 2 with just better graphics, so they also did not really give it much of a chance.
@@MrSheduur it's not even out yet?
7:59 Quake 1 actually does have a form of autohop. If you release space after you jump and then press it back down, the game will buffer your jump input, so as soon as you hit the ground you jump again.
it works like this in every quake
Former Reflex Arena dev here: "We will likely never see anything like this happen ever". Well, I've got some ideas it seems you'd like but unfortunately *another* reason why AFPS games are dead is because game dev is expensive and they rarely make their money back, let alone enough for a sequel ;). But hey, if I ever win the lottery, I'd love to build one. Anyway, great video and agreed on all points.
Would have being cool if Reflex Arena went open source, maybe the community could chip in some bucks now a then. Basicly what Xonotic is doing.
I'd software claims Quake Chsmpions was a financial success, I doubt they're lying.
Always fun to hop on Quake Live. Its a very special place. I've never seen so many gamers 40+ that are that good at fps games in one place.
Quake Live instagib is unbeatable.
Well damn. That's good to know!
and they can also answer any IT questions u happen to have
My short story about multiplayer games: I have always been a single-player gamer, but back in my school days, my friend decided to introduce me to multiplayer games. He was a Quake III enthusiast, so we started playing Quake together. It was an impossible task for me. Although I understood everything he taught me about reading maps, calculating item respawn times, and predicting enemy movements based on their status, it was too challenging for my slower thinking process. Then, I decided to try Counter-Strike on my own, but it was also a major failure. Every time I died, I had to wait for the match to restart, and since I died numerous times, it felt like I was spending more time waiting than actually playing. The final game I tried was Unreal Tournament, and it was slightly better because the maps were bigger. This gave me, as a slow thinker, some chances to hide and surprise attack enemies when they least expected it. However, despite these attempts, the simple truth was that I didn't enjoy online games. I completely skipped this part until PUBG was released. It turned out to be a real game-changer for me! It was slow-paced and felt more like a stealth game, which I'm a fan of in the single-player world. With PUBG, I got a second chance at online games, and I also tried the Battlefield series (1 to V) and liked them too. I won't say i'm good at playing PUBG and Battlefield, but at least i could spent a rare evening in them without a feeling that i was raped.
Yeah, you pretty much described why these games are popular. You are the guy these games were made for, and most people are like you. And pretty much also most people felt the same way about arena shooters and arcade shooters in general. the skill ceiling was simply too much of a turnoff for people who just want to play "at their own pace".
From someone who still plays Quakeworld, this is a pretty solid video. One thing you missed though is what specifically makes movement so difficult in Quakeworld, and that's friction. VQ3/QL and CPMA are much more forgiving due to the low friction, whereas in quake 1, jumps and routes have to be near perfect, since barely nudging a wall or stair brings you to a complete halt. This is a huge huge barrier to entry, even compared to VQ3/CPMA, since it punishes you so much for mistakes. If I could change one thing about Quake, I would change friction to be more similar to CPMA. I think any variation of Q3 is probably more accessible to new players for this reason. Q3 at least went in the right direction with less friction, making it "easier", but I wouldn't ever want it dumbed down any further than that. Like you said, the community would probably be against this change though. On the upside though, small communities in arena FPS games are generally pretty welcoming, so even if you're really bad, we'll still duel you.
A big factor that let CS take over is the cadence and rhythm to the game. There's a distinct ebb and flow to each round and then to the series of rounds, letting you relax between high attention moments. This makes the game more sustainable to play mentally and makes the highs higher. When you play quake, you kind of have to be switched on all the time and it can be exhausting. There's also the matter of compounding skills and the winner-take-all nature of quake. If I'm 20% better than my friend and we 1v1 in quake3, I will win 20 to -4. In counter-strike, even the best player in the world can be taken down by randomness or an unexpected move. Every dog can have his day. Where quake is more of a pure skill test which is not fun for people at the bottom.
TTK also plays a role. With low TTK even the veterans can be killed if they are caught off guard. The high TTK, however, gives so much room for error that the gaming veterans are virtually unkillable.
@@sergeydoronin1579This is why Bushido Blade is the best fighting game. Unironically.
There were Quake 3 mods that gave a rhythm to the matches, like Rocket Arena
Every game has it's frustrations honestly. The ebb and flow is precisely why I never got into Counter strike. The low ttk means you die very quickly and then have to wait a good 5 or so minutes only to get killed again. I found it incredibly annoying. Arena shooters failed because the devs mostly abandoned them. I used to play quake live back in 2015 or so and had a ton of fun everytime I managed to find a server. I especially loved clan arena. But the game barely got any updates and only the pros were playing. Then they decided to bring the game to steam and add a few newbie friendly features like load outs ( all they did was give older players an even more of an unfair advantage), a couple of new maps and made it fully pay to play. But after that it just got abandoned. Arena shooters can still succeed. They just need a popular company to push them into the mainstream.
@@saisameer8771 5 minutes? That's too much, if your team has tryhards that play slowly and survive until the last second maybe you'll have to wait 2 minutes tops until the next round. But that's rare, as most people rush everywhere. And I think the downtime is a good thing if you want to think tactically about why the enemy won that engagement
Let me preface this with... I'm old. I started multiplayer gaming on DWANGO Doom and graduated to TCP/IP Quake then QuakeWorld, and continued playing arena FPS games through Quake Live before eventually filtering out-- so I've seen arena FPS games at their absolute peak in terms of popularity and playerbase, down into the waning years. Arena shooters were destined to die, and only survived because they had a captive audience. At the height of AFPS popularity, they flourished because they were uniquely suited to their time. They ruled the roost when most people couldn't stay on the Internet playing games all day, before broadband Internet was a normal thing people had. The kind of drop-in, zero-to-sixty instant action of deathmatch lent itself perfectly to time-limited Internet access. Things like "game balance" didn't really matter when just the novelty of logging in and fragging out was mindblowing. But when people got broadband Internet access, and in general had more time to spend, game balance started to matter a lot more. And what your tactical, class-based, or loadout-based shooters brought to the table that AFPS games failed to implement were comeback mechanics and frequent gamestate resets. People are not going to put up with having to endure an entire match of getting absolutely railroaded by one person controlling a whole map/lobby *with no recourse* unless they absolutely have to. Counter-Strike may be slower (and more boring), but you're always a save round away from having an M4 and being on equal footing with everyone else in the lobby. In TF2 or CoD, you always have access to your weapons-of-choice. You always have access to the tools that allow you to express the game's needed skills whereas in AFPS games you have to express a considerable amount of skill just to acquire and access those tools. It's a big reason why fighting games survive, and AFPS games die: In a fighting game you always have full access to your tools to express skill. In AFPS games the strategic factor of denying people access to their tools for long periods of time leads to a frustration that most people aren't willing to put up with. Whoever is on the losing end is going to have a bad time *for a long time*, and so without a captive audience, it's always going to lead to hemorrhaging players away.
Actually, the reason fighting games survive is because they have offline bot content and local multiplayer. A lot of the hardcore online enthusiasts of arena shooters and fighting games kinda forget... they're a fairly small niche; the majority of sales with - for example - Mortal Kombat? Come from people who never touch the multiplayer except with friends on the couch.
incidentally, i think that goes a long way towards explaining why doom 2 dm and ctf, while hardly anywhere near any of its peaks, is something that absolutely refuses to die despite being nearly _30_ years old: mappers realized it was a lot more fun if everyone spawns on ssgs like it's not a universal rule or anything, but 99% of pvp maps anyone plays is gonna have every life start you with the marquee weapon that can take an opponent from 100% to 0% with a good meatshot even if they have green armor, and will still do so p. reliably even if they have blue armor. and while that blue armor thing demonstrates how proper map control is still a powerful tool ( blue armor alone might not guarantee surviving an flubbed ssg joust, but green armor and a soulsphere will, and then there's the utility of the rocket launcher and plasma rifle and the sheer _devastation_ you can commit with bfg control ) it nonetheless goes a looooooong way in making sure that a freshly respawned player can immediately contest their opponent, rather than needing to go on a resupply route that their full-power opponent can intercept and convert into chain frags plus the primary movement tech can be reasonably felt out by just running around. as in, it's literally just realizing that you move _dramatically_ faster when running forward and strafing at the same time. there's extra depth to push it further, but you still get 67% of the effect solely through pressing two buttons and looking somewhat off to the side. it's certainly a fair bit easier to pick up than airstrafing, to say the least
Longtime FFA player here-- Duels absolutely have this problem, but it's specifically because you're matching 1:1 and guaranteeing that the leading player's resource management will set the tempo and pace for the game fullstop. FFA, at its highest levels, still had the insane skill expression and still had disgustingly hard games, but the way that the game flow works makes it MUCH less oppressive; not only does the existence of other players break up the gamestate enough to allow for isolated frags/resource collection from other players, but the existence of other players is exceptionally disruptive to a stacked player maintaining optimized routing. FFA adds an element of leveraging other players to your advantage, either with allowing you to find space to restack after a death or distracting other threats. The beautiful thing about FFA in my opinion is that this isn't restricted to high level, either-- Lower level players still will benefit from higher level players' split attention, even if they can't as efficiently leverage the others in the lobby. It's hard for me to imagine that duels' unapproachability (Essentially fighting game momentum levels in a strict 1v1) drove away the more casual playerbase, when I would have expected that the more dedicated playerbase would be the ones trying to engage in duels to begin with, and the casual players would stick around in more skill-variance friendly modes like FFA, Instagib, Freezetag, etc. I could absolutely be wrong and misjudging the casual appeal of duels, as again, that wasn't the most interesting dynamic for me (It is neither enjoyable to stomp somebody in a duel, nor to be stomped, either of which is the likely outcome of any given duel given its extreme momentum-based pendulum swing), but yeah
Speaking of map control and movement, one thing I've been thinking about having tried to watch some team format Quake Champs and Diabotical: Watching a Quakelike is mostly only possible in duel. In a team game, you have two packs of Ferraris roaming the map nonstop and there's little structure to the thing, fights feel like a series of drivebys with little rhyme or reason, while Duel has a comprehensible structure to it and a generally nice pace. Meanwhile, as a casual player, TDM and CTF are far more sensible formats than duel as outlined by the posters above. Now, contrast with tactical shooters, where the teams stake out, develop, and contest positions. That works, both for spectating and actually playing, and the positions can be static enough that you can work out plays on the mic. That's genuinely valuable. TF2 strikes a balance, but there's still some comprehensibility with the contested objectives and so on. OW1/2 is an absolute mess for an outsider to spectate, but fundamentally strikes a pretty good balance between arcadey madness and characters/teams fighting over positions and then devolving into an absolutely mad fireworks show. Amazing fun, if the meta is good. The bad metas we try to forget because they were... And all of them are team games, of course, which matters, as can be seen in team sports vs. 1v1 sports and in the rise of eg. MOBAs over RTS and so on. So if you wanted an arena FPS to live, IMO what you'd need to build is a game that's team-based and strikes a balance between letting people do zany things and the teams staking out comprehensible positions. The kind of zooming all around the map rotating pickups thing is, I think, the anchor that kills Quake-likes in the grander scheme of things.
You're right. I played Quake III Arena on the Dreamcast (with bots, because no internet access). Even on Dreamcast with mouse and keyboard (!) the last levels really were hardcore. I'm 100% sure I couldnt beat the bot game today, but I remember playing it with 13 or 14 years old and I needed A TON of time to make it. Booted up Quake Champions and got slaughtered. Problem is: back then I had plenty of time and motivation to "endure" and learn the machanics. Now as 34 years old under no circumstances I would play a game 100+ hours to learn it properly. It just isn't worth the effort. Gaming now for me is casual. If i want to "work", I go to work! Even remember playing against Xan on Hyperblast map Unreal Tournament 99. Guy was jumping left and right, doing flips and cooking himself dinner while I tried to survive.
I remember 1v1'ing a friend in UT and loosing 30-0, then speccing him play another friend and then he lost 30-0. Yeah, big skill gap in those games.
Yeah that was normal stuff. When you had put so much time into a shooter based on quake or hl, you were levels above anyone else, even people who considered themselves to be good because they could dominate some rounds on public servers. You did not even break a sweat most of the time. I cannot remember how many times I played regular folks in hl1 deathmatch or ut deathmatch modes (even though I never really played ut at a pro level) and it was a slaughterhouse for them which lead to people being frustrated, including me, because they had absolutely no chance against me. I did not play arena shooters alot, but my knowledge from playing team fortress classic and quake 3 fortress at a pro level was enough to absolutely dominate anyone but pro players in most quake3 mods and hl mods, as most of the gameplay and knowledge about weapon trajectories and where to aim depending on jump angle from players etc was enough to be virtually untouchable by lower tier players... the time spent really went into muscle memory, and like someone else here in the comments put it, it translated very well between similar games, so you always had that extra level compared to the normal players who played it casually.
I got Quake 3 for Christmas back in 01 and it eventually became a game I would plan tons of in high school. But I enjoyed the mods more than the default arena mode. Mods like FreezeDT (not the inferior uFreeze), RA3, Excessive, and Jailbreak. It added variety. Also killing servers for "match making" prevented people from forming friendships and clans, which is another way to improve. Through the social aspect. Modern day games really don't encourage it in the same way.
Some of those edits were just fun watch.
Movement is definetly a big reason reason imo. It raises the skill floor unreasonably high so that most new players just get turned off by the idea of spending hours upon hours of practicing just so they can move before they can actually play the game.
I feel like Tribes and more recently Titanfall 2 are great examples of how good (but hard) movement systems can really limit the audience for a game. Part of the reason why COD still has such a large place in the market is because its easy to lie to yourself and convince yourself that you're pretty good, all it takes is to win a few games, or when that fails look at your kdr. When you play a game with advanced movement tech, aiming becomes harder in general, and when someone is better than you, its easier to tell because you're getting eaten alive and cant seem to land a single shot, and while plenty of people still throw around the word "hax" as an accusation, when that's just how every good player is playing, most people will eventually confront that they're not in that group, or they'll quit to avoid it.
@@XeroShifterwell said
yeah, it's more fun to plant a carrot in farming simulator. Not every game if for everyone. i hate cards-based game but i am reluctant to tell that they "are boring and stupid" just because i can't seem to find point in them.
@@XeroShifter Oddly, the one game we have now with pretty meaningful movement tech is... Splatoon. The thing is that, despite being deep, having obscure tricks, and taking some time to learn, you can still be decent (but not top level) early on. Even then, a lot of the tech is rather intuitive, so it often leaves players feeling like they found some huge secret. Sadly, most people write the game off as a baby game and don't realize it's actually one of the closest things we have right now to a classic arena shooter. Leave it to Nintendo, I guess. But the internet's irrational hatred of Nintendo means even less people will find out first hand.
@@purrpocalypse I wouldn't call the hatred for Nintendo irrational given their litigious nature towards things like community tournaments, but I agree that Splatoon is severely underrated, and is very close to a modern arena shooter. Splatoon is held back by a lot of its surrounding design elements sadly. It can be supremely grindy to unlock weapons and then tweak your gear when you're first starting out. The fact that you can't host lan tournaments, or really any sort of tournaments at all thanks to team shuffling. Nintendo's communications hosting service, and a bunch of other places where Nintendo has locked everything down. The core gameplay is awesome, the movement tech is well done, but it feels like Nintendo intentionally does a lot to ensure that none of their games can actually develop a dedicated scene that isn't fully in their control.
One of the reasons I like Clan Arena in Quake Live/Open Arena, is that everyone has the same loadout, and there are no map powerups (which addresses the player choice/map issue). The tier system that QL used to have addressed the learning curve issue, but either way it's still a fun game :)
really sick, well made, high quality educational content! tons of work is put into makin one, thank you for that
The immediate high, followed immediately by the backlash for HL2DM was rough... While it's true that some forms of prop boosting got nerfed, it was mostly the most broken, so the competitive scene is still quite insane. As a result though, a good chunk of the player based only plays on "hi-kill" servers as they don't stand a chance on more stock settings. Given mechanical differences between servers, many form their own communities and function on "game nights" rather than being continually active, so knowing when to sign in depending on what style you want to play is key.
I used to host a server a few years ago for it. I kept it strictly stock with maps and higher airaccel but none of my friends ever enjoyed playing it as much as I did lol
I just wish the damn input lag was fixed for HL2DM.
@@sulphurous2656 that's not a problem I've heard many complaints about. Would you care to go into it more for discussion?
Oh wait a minute you're xeogin, I know you lmao
@@saltierdongs7760 likewise 😂
Back when Gianni Mattagrano started his fraggy friday streams was the most fun I’d ever had in QC. Wanna know why? It brought in thousands on players new to the game. I’d never seen so many Rangers and Sorlags populate the arenas in my life. It was interesting too watching everyone learn the game at once as opposed to what Quake Live’s become with only the elite still playing.
Too bad he's supporting troony tunes.
@@UtubeH8tr troony tunes?
@@oyveyshalom IT'S TIME FOR TRAAAAAAAAAANIMAAAAAAAANIAAAAAACS THEY'RE LOONEY TO THE MAX THEY GOT BOLOGNA IN THEIR SLACKS THERE'S AN AXE WOUND IN THEIR PANTS. THEY"RE TRANIMANIACS!
Gianni kinda mid ngl
@@danielegglord i wont deny he's got skill, i'll give him that but yeesh budd, he's getting close to cringey teamfourstar dub levels.
When there is no one to blame but themselves players get very frustrated. A game mode like TDM offloads the frustration to teammates, also it creates a lot of consolation prizes. For example, being first place on the losing team feels a lot better than being ranked 6/10 in the lobby.
Wrong, the game design itself was to blame. Not skill
@@ExpertContrarian Not exclusive concepts. What I wrote adresses design and how it interacts with players of all skills. Fighting games and deathmatch are harder on mid/low skill players than team games. That's why TDM w/ objective modes are the most popular FPS MP games. In domination, a low skill player can hold points, and get easy captures, they can play objective, and be the "best objective player" on a losing team and feel fine about themselves.
Look at sports like Tennis, GOlf, Martial Arts, those are me vs. you and creates a similar dynamic to arena shooters.. like you said there is nothing to "offload" frustration aside from yourself. There are no cheese mechanics that allow players a quick regain or free kills like certain ultimates in OW2 for example. At the end of the day what made games like Quake 3 amazing was also their downfall. The insane movement, mechanical skill, strategy and positioning was incredible -- and incredible to watch as well. That unforgivingness gave the genre its' charm but it was also hurt players new to the game. Quake3/QuakeLive will go down as one of my favorite games of all time. The rush of dueling someone who's just a bit better than you and finally besting them is something games these days cannot replicate.
this is a good video, I also want to note and state. As a person who does work on games for a living. There is always an expectation and thought that certain game genres etc may boom or return later in the years as a choice, trend or even as competitive sports. Arena shooters and fighting games had one thing in common back in the day, it let us meet people irl and make more friends eventually building a community. With how newer games has locked us to stay at home and play online with no actual physical connection, a lot of people I know and spoken to do say they don't like gaming like this anymore and wish to go out and meet people again. Games like these do shine due to this. Only trouble is, don't make this as a nostalgia factor. A good game will be that which not only brings back older folks but also introduces itself to younger people. In turn making it a larger community. Of course it doesn't have to be a perfect game as long as it is fun.
I miss this genre. Quake and unreal tournament were amazing. Shit, even multiplayer duke Nukem 3d was awesome. Bring it back.
Check QC:DE. ;)
Play Quake Champions. It is hella fun.
Boomers moved on. Now its their kids doing the fartnite dance..
I used to love playing duke nukem on ps1 with my brother and step dad
@@CCDNNewsNetwork Loved it on ps1 and the n64 version, still have a ton of old console games saved. Didn't get into pc gaming much later..
Simple answer to the title. Arena shooters take skill and dedication
As someone who grew up playing quake 3 and later quake live, it made me really happy to see someone talk about this so in depth. Really good vid.
Well done video. It's sad because these were some of the greatest games of all time, but the fact that it would be near impossible to balance making these games more accessible while keeping the fast paced high skill ceiling gameplay really made this an unwinnable gambit.
It feels a bit sad to know that I only really got into Arena Shooters properly after playing Unreal following it's removal from legal storefronts and long after the genre fizzled out. Whilst I did sporadically play Quake Live before, I never realized just how much I was missing out in past years until that point. Still, it feels nice to know that I can still catch a glimpse of what once was with the few dedicated players that still remain.
You can still play Unreal Tournament online by installing some patches, there are still some servers
One other thing to remember is for the longest time a game had multiplayer modes and no matter how good it was, the next game would come out and people moved on. 99% of games with deathmatch modes are dead. Especially EA games having their servers shut down. Giving the community power to host things, to mode things helps. Also having a strong single player experience is good for those who don’t want to be stomped by a pro
Well, some call them pro and some just call them shitbucket. I have 0 reason to play multiplayer in 99% of games.
Really enjoying this video so far, thank you! A quick correction on the respawn timer for the megahealth in Quake 1, in case another comment hasn't mentioned it yet, is that the timer is 20 seconds, not 90. The major difference being that the timer is linked to the person that last picked it up and will not start until that person's health goes to 100 or below. In maps with multiple megahealth packs, like DM3 for example, it is possible to pick up all three and deny all other players the opportunity to even see one spawn for quite some time if you manage your battles well. (And armour in Quake 1 respawned in 20 seconds, rather than the 25 in Quake 3. Who knows why they made this change.) I miss this type of game a lot. What I'd give for Epic to take some of their Fortnite money and remake UT2004...
Very well done made video, I subbed you. Keep up the good work!
Diabotical could have been a good successor for Q3/QL. Unfortunately it is Epic Store exclusive and it wasn't very well advertised.
Seriously. Diabotical was wonderful. It didn't help that a LOT of community-building features planned early on needed to be cut, either.
it was bad
@@goaway7904 How so?
I was interested in Diabotical when they were showing off some fun weapons and movement stuff that was not a copy of Q3. Then they released a Q3 clone but not as fun. I played for quite a while but I'm not surprised people didn't stay. I felt that it was focusing way too much on bein an esport that they forgot to make it fun for the general audience.
@@LaggyLuke But they DID have "fun weapons and movement that weren't a copy of Q3"... they included all that stuff...
I loved Q3A so much when I was younger. You're spot on with AFPS games of that variety having vets that just rock the shit out of anyone getting used to the game for the first time. Maybe one day we'll see a revival in the multiplayer sense. Great video dude, world needs more skeletons making videos.
Btw im a fan of your content :)
Hi herb! Funny that i came from ultrakill to quake champions and i like it a ton!
Quality video. It always feels like there's still a good potential playerbase for the arena shooter genre. I think it'll just take one successful modern implementation that doesn't compromise on its design. There have been so many games that half-scratch the arena shooter itch in so many different ways, but there's always a crucial piece missing from it. On the topic of Lcanceling in melee/P+ btw, it may seem arbitrary from the perspective of a binary choice of whether or not to use it, but the depth of Lcanceling as a mechanic comes instead from your ability to throw off your opponent's Lcancels. Because of hitlag, you have to time an Lcancel differently depending on whether or not you whiff an attack or hit a player/shield. A player can put up a shield as bait, and then spotdodge, wavedash out of shield, or shield toggle from full to light shield, etc, in order to throw the timing off from their opponent's pressure and open them up. This even happens plenty at lower/mid levels of play, but players are often just not conscious that this is happening. (It's not at all a perfect mechanic though, and imo it would be a lot better if there was some sort of bigger penalty for missing an Lcancel. There's an argument to be made about Lcanceling locking you out from a tech window, but that's only partially true. It's just as often that going for an Lcancel will give you an amsah tech when you're hit, since you're also likely DIing down while trying to fast fall. Plus, it's possible to Lcancel with a soft press on the analogue triggers anyway, so technically you'd never have to worry about missing techs if you learned to Lcancel with light presses.)
Great, interesting video ! I'm glad I got it in my recommandations. I just liked it, subbed to your channel and put the alarm to get informed on the next ones. Keep up the good work ! 😁
There's really one simple thing that killed the arena shooter: They're too niche for the big publishers to care about. In the late 2000s, every big developer that made games like Quake or Unreal Tournament was growing MASSIVE. Their budgets and dev teams were ballooning to ridiculous sizes. Because of that, they needed to increase their income as well. So niche, high skill genres like FPS and RTS got dumbed down a lot in an attempt to bring in the much bigger casual and console audiences. And when that still failed to bring in more players, they simply stopped making them all together. I'm glad that the indie scene has kept more niche games like that alive at least a little bit. But I would also love to see them reappear in the mainstream "AAA" level again. Games like Doom Eternal show there is an audience for it, even if it won't bring them Fortnite levels of profits. I also wish Epic would die in a fire for de-listing every Unreal game from every digital store.
While I love Indie games, unfortunately they are limited by not having a ton of funding or employees to make games in genres that need larger budgets. This is especially the case with multiplayer games, since servers aren’t cheap, and the less players you have, the worse the experience is, unlike singleplayer games where the experience is the same regardless of how many people are playing. This makes them a lot riskier, which isn’t something many devs are willing to take. There are plenty of genres where indie games thrive, where few large publishers make games of, like Platformers, Metroidvanias, rougelikes etc. But for the genres where making an indie game is difficult, and bigger game publishers don’t care about, they slowly die of obscurity.
Another recommendation is warfork. It’s free, and is basically quake, but you have both forms of bhopping, and you can turn your momentum into a dash when you hit the floor, allowing you to change directions easily and wall-jump. It’s a bit more on the dead side, but I hope with this comment I can make it a little less dead.
Also Diabotical!
How have I only just discovered your channel. I absolutely love this
Happy to feature in your video at 5:07 lol. I haven't played Champions in a long time
I was sooo hyper for Reflex Arena - it ticked every box and was a technical masterpiece, the perfect arena fps game. Just to become DOA. If Quake Champions couldn't get an audience, nothing probably can.
Quake Champions just "feels" worse than Live. My friends and I exclusively play instagib and Champion's rail gun feels very off and inconsistent in comparison.
Reflex was my first afps and I really wanted to get into it. I was so bummed it died after practicing 100+ hours on just movement alone, but I had so much fun.
QC is a game for no one. The game structure is still too Quake to bring in new players in droves, there’s no map editor, custom servers, and the heroes thing scared away a lot of veterans. The controls are also just straight up broken in QC, the mouse movement is way off. Compared to other FPS games it feels good, compared to like QL, Quake 4, or Reflex, the mouse is laggy and doesn’t interpret movements right.
"it ticked every box and was a technical masterpiece" eh, not really. performance sucked. it was too demanding when it came out, and that was after YEARS in early access where they really should have figured out how to optimize it so it would have a smooth launch. the same is true for Quake Champions which looked quite good but also demanded high end GPUs (GTX 1060 minimum) to play it at "AFPS framerates". Diabotical which you didn't mention had better performance but also laughably outdated graphics so PROPORTIONALLY SPEAKING it had the same issue really. you needed a contemporary GPU just to play it at all, when it looks like a game from the early 2000s. the bottom line is that AFPS have a completely different level of expected performance. time and time again devs go one of two ways: - think they can launch a 60 fps game with nice graphics. no. no, you can't in the AFPS space. stop doing this. - think they can cheat by making a really ugly game. no. no, you can't convince people to play a NEW, DIFFERENT game if it lacks nice graphics. With Reflex and QC the problem was people wanted to give these games a chance but at the end of the day the older games they were used to just felt sooo much better, which was 90% down to performance. With Diabotical the problem was that it doesn't warranted getting excited about since it's like a "Quake 3 but cartoon graphics and the character models float in the air which messes with your rocket aim" which absolutely nobody asked for. and it didn't even run well, just barely well enough.
Another small issue about Arena FPS games, based on my personal experience, is the frustration for new players due to the saturation of pro players (mostly player that have an insane amount of hours and experience). Not supportive at all and this discourage the new comers, unless you have steel motivation. This indirectly influencer the arrive of new players
Played Q3 Arena on my Dreamcast back in the day against bots. Loved the levels and the game in general. After not having played any arena shooter for basically decades my brother asked me for Quake Champions and i got it too. I'm getting absolutely obliterated. Players saying: "ok, but you s*ck and need to learn. You need to watch youtube videos and learn to play properly dude! It's not the game, it's you dude!" Understandable - but I simply don't have the time, nor would i put the effort for "working" on game skill for 100 or even 300+ hours. Not worth my time. With 34 years of age, next to no video game is worth playing 300+ hours right now.
@@milan51259 damn I thought I was the only one that understood this basic concept of "I just want to play for fun, not to become a rocket-jump ninja"😂
@@mattialonghin_mr.l857 It's sad for the franchise they could not get rid of the hardcore-gamer, because these hardcore-gamers are only a few people basically. Back in the day there was hype for Q3 Arena and Unreal Tournament. Everybody played it - it was new, fresh and never seen before, so there were (very) good players, average and noobs. But Hardcore-gamers spent their life playing this arena-shooters and hype died down obviously in the last 20 years, so no noob or even average gamer wants to bother with the steep learning curve of movement and general skillset needed to survive them. The whole existance of the hardcore-arena-shooter gamer now is to tell the noob how much he sucks and to feel as masterrace. In the meantime they developed other fps and new generation plays it with much fun, while arena-shooters are for the 40 year old gamer with no life, but Quake. I also remember playing UT 99 mostly against bots or in LAN with my noob/average friends. This was mega-fun. But coming to internet game in Quake 3 for example is like going to dominatrix to get my a** whipped. Nobody sane would do that.
@@milan51259 I have to agree. The only logical way to resurect these type of games would be to get rid of hardcore players and let everyone start again fron zero. But you can't, new players need to be strong and to arm with parience and will, and they will at least be able to play without being reduced to a punching bag. I k ow this for personal experience, i am still considered a noob, but I can take some of these players sometimes
Was very shocked when I saw you only had 5k subscribers this is very high quality
Wow, you hit every nail on the head. This was an excellent video!
Despite the addition of autohop, a different movement quirk means that holding jump gives you a little bit less speed than tapping it. So tapping is still better than holding, but you can still buffer jumps instead of having to be a robot to be able to bunnyhop at all
Another thing that fighting games are doing, as of more recently, that I think arena FPS could be doing, is that they’re providing more casual content, without lowering the skill ceiling. They’re offering more character customization, tutorials, campaigns, ranking systems with progression/playtime rewards. I think the most important thing is the recent focus on a more robust story mode in fighting games. Something where the casual player can learn mechanics, while not feeling like they’re just running drills. For progressive rewards players could earn armor like halo 3 (even though most players use forced models in arena FPS), they could earn icons and player tags aswell. Fighting games and Arena FPS are some of my most recent, but favorite genres. And seeing fighting games try to reach a more casual audience lately, does give me hope for Arena FPS in the future. Doom 2016, Eternal, and the recent onslaught of PVE focused indie boomer shooters is also promising. I think if Doom 2016 hadn’t watered down their multiplayer so much, they would have had something pretty special on their hands. So here’s hopin’. Great video, homie.
Glad you added fighting games in this video. I went from Unreal tournament to fighting games, hard road to travel.
Thanks for pointing out the flick stick. It's so good, more people need to know about it. I hope it will be the default one day
You're gonna go far man, some polishing on the edits and audio, a touch of brevity and you're golden.
Hey I still try to get in at least an hour of Quake3/Live a week. Played a few games or ROTT recently too with the rerelease. We need the return of Quake 3 or UT, so so so bad.
Really interesting observation on player choice. An important and sometimes overlooked element of map design.
Random info: the music from 1:08 onwards is called "you ain't the boss o' me" by james paddock for the doom addon sigil
My favorite FPS was, is, and always will be Unreal Tournament. I've always liked the free-form movement that the game had as well as the weapon loadout. And the music was kickass.
I say, as former UT99, year 2001 duel champion in my country, Amen brother :D. Even still got at home shirt signed from Gitzzz :D
It was also little things like linking that one weapon to other players to increase it's damage or healing output. Plus like many shooters, you could take a hit or two normally and shake off the 'error'.
@@vaclavnemec9053crazy man! « Gitzz » haha, I personnaly was ranked 7th on 1v1 worldwide for ut2k4, could never win against Winz lol
Unreal tournament 99goty edition was amazing. Low grav jump matches and instagib matches were the most hardcore you could get. Telefrag matches were a completely different level.
Editing is so good
really like your side bits in gmod and stuff.
I know the feel of the difficulty part. Growing up playing quake I was fairly good at it, but none of my friends would join me in playing because they thought the game was too difficult and went right back to call of duty. We did have a small compromise when doom 2016’s multiplayer came out (which I still think is underrated and found very fun) as well as Titanfall, but none of them stuck around once the new call of duty came around. Now I get called the quake boomer of the group hahah
You can call them quake noob crybabies
Do you still play Quake Live?
A while ago I summarised similar points and ideas for my friends over this particular subject and you, my friend, put these all together in just the most fitting way as possible. Is this the first long-essay type-ish video too? I'd say you nailed it fair and share! Good work my mate!
Great video! Tribes was sad it wasn't included though.
7:15 L-cancel as a mechanic gives spot dodge and any other intangible moves more value as hitting a shield and hitting nothing changes the landing time of aerial attacks, thus giving you a defensive mixup to throw off their L-cancel timing and thus, giving yourself a window to counterattack.
I disagree that arena FPS is too hard, i think it's one of the most accessible Genres you can play -*PROVIDED* You can play with people of the same skill level. These game's by themselves are not hard, it's just that everyone who is still playing them is so _Good_ at them it chokes out room for growth.
I Agree. Likewise, it can go the other way as well. Team Fortress 2 is one of the harshest games i've played yet because the skill range is so broad and very few people take it seriously, it is much easier for beginners to play.
An Interesting Question I’ve always thought about is why did Arena Shooters “Die” while Fighting Games managed to survive into the modern age to eventually reach the heights they have in the past year IE: EVO becoming the biggest in-person Esports event of ALL TIME.
Fighting games work on consoles, they actually give a shit about aesthetics, they're easier for spectators to follow, they fill a unique gameplay niche, they have more to offer for beginner and intermediate players, and AFPS never had that mega hit to build off of like SF2/MK/Tekken/Smash.
@@ReddRambler yeah contrary to popular belief but even in the 90s afps was always niche really
Put simply: Fighting games have frequent gamestate resets and comeback mechanics, whereas AFPS games generally don't. You can get absolutely obliterated by someone in a fighting game, but the opponent's resource advantage (meter) only lasts through a single set, and a single set only lasts *at most* for a few minutes. Some popular fighting games like UMvC3 for example even have outright comeback mechanics through things like X-factor that scale up in power the further behind you are. In an arena shooter, someone getting on an advantageous cycle in a map can snowball and steamroll it, and you're just stuck getting your crap pushed in for 10 minutes with no real recourse. And that's just for a single round if you're playing round-based. Plus, in a fighting game you always have access to your full toolkit. In AFPS games a huge chunk of the strategic gameplay revolves around denying your opponent access to their tools (weapons, armor, powerups). Being on the receiving end of having your tools denied so you can't even express your full skill for long periods of time is frustrating and ultimately turns people away.
@@krad2520 The snowballing issue is why I wish Hoonymode became the standard instead of time based Duel. In Hoonymode when one player scores a kill, BOTH players respawn and the map resets. It's closer to how a fighting game works and goes a long way towards mitigating blowouts.
There's money to be made with an spectator sport. And fighting games are easy to grasp for a new audience. Player mashes buttons, hits other player. Arenashooters look very "messy" to someone who doesn't know what's going on, maps can be disorienting due to the 3rd dimension being heavily used, movement and resource management are basically alien to any viewer, until someone (or a 30min video) explains it.
Great Video! I always wondered..
everybody quit playing q3 because i mopped the floor with their faces
Acknowledging Reflex... is that legal?
Hey, first video I ever saw from your channel and I loved it, it resonated a lot with me. Guess we both are drawn to those games where there is a skill gap and you're not just shooting things brain dead. I played my fair share of fighting games and yes, the skill gap there is hard on new players, with with SF6 it seems to be way better. I wanted to get better at Quake Champions, love watching it being played on high level, but man, I AM being noobstomped and it seems I can't find anyone who is a noob as me to practice without being super frustated, or without it feeling like I'm going to the gym and praying to find someone there to instruct me.
Great vid dude. Miss the old days of Quake
Thank you, Great and fun video, subscribed
Tactical/milsim shooters (COD, Battlefield) killed the Arena genre IMO. Doesn't help that the devs themselves didn't really do much to market or improve their products. I still play a lot of UT2004 and it's almost mind blowing how advanced it is for the early 2000s. Such a shame Epic killed the franchise that gave them their success.
I wouldn't call COD milsim nor tactical shooter. Same thing with battlefield.
If COD/BF are tactical shooters then I'm Nikola Tesla
CoD is ARMA for the ADD-addled. Not actually a Milsim, but it looks like one, and mixes the intensity with arcade action. They were never going for realism, but they were definitely going for verisilimitude, at least with CoD4.
To clarify mega health in quake1/quakeworld, it respawns 20 seconds after it's depleted. Not always 90 seconds.
wow what a quality video. A rare one these days. Subbed.
Great video! Thank you!
The only modern arena shooter which is actually alive that I can think of is Krunker, but it barely classifies as an arena shooter. I recommend checking it out.
Very good content. One thing I'd add (and that I got from the venerable John Carmack when I worked at FB), the improvements in physics engine cause many of the good old mechanics that exist in Quake to look and feel very bad. More recently, this has been worked around in titles like Doom 2016 by adding double jump and ledge grabbing, but this require the genra to reinvent itself to some extent.
But Double Jumping and Ledge Grabbing take no skill to perform, and aren’t as fun nor fluid as bhops
The game design lends to extremely one sided matches as a dominant player will dominate the map resources through out the match. Fast movement, small player models etc. also widen the skill gap between players. Newer games tend to do almost anything to narrow the skill gap down, they make movement slow, guns kill fast, you respawn with a full kit etc. And there are good sides and bad sides to all of this. It's just that newbie friendly tend to be more popular and sell more.
To add to this, it also felt that innovation in the arena shooter genre died over time. It was basically the same thing from 1996 all the way to the early 2000's after which modern military shooters started to take over. I think UT 2K4 had the right idea combining arena shooter gameplay (albeit slowed down compared to Quake) with objective based gamemodes. It's still my favourite shooter of all time.
Cool video. Lots of games I loved to play. I got Quake 3 arena ported to the Oculus Quest 2. Wow thats a massive refresh on that game. Lots of fun and the movement mech (vision)now influenced by physical head movement gives it very fun experience. But whats up with the end of the video with that kid? He get caught with his webcam on?
As a 'new' quake pro player, more people should try Quake Champions compared to the older quake games this one is really well balance and easier to play, has an active player base (the biggest in AFPS), competitive scene/pro league every Saturday/Friday on twitch, new updates with content every season, ranking system with matchmaking and at the same time casual players who just want to chill and not go super hardcore, also the best part about it: a really nice community of people :D Just lacks more marketing because seems like no one heard about this game or that they have the old memory of the failed launch.
Bruh it has ms caps.
tried it yesterday. I used to play arenas as well as old cod titles in the promod version, no crappy stuff. matchmaking is way too randomly unbalanced and plus, players themselves, claim that the title is dead... i was hoping so bad to find a title to play cause i'm so sick of all theese battleroyale and such crappy games
honestly i think a big factor is the obsession with airstrafing. like, so many modern arena shooters try to move like quake to be as fast as quake, completely disregarding the fact that quake's movement kinda. blows like it's very skillful and makes for very spectacular spectating when you're watching high-level players navigate maps, that's undeniable, but it's just kinda nonsense dependent on unintuitive engine jank. like, okay, rocket jumping is a beautifully intuitive yet complex maneuver that makes sense in anything where someone can survive their own rocket explosion. bunnyhopping is a bit of a video game physics thing, but it's easy to understand and put into practice when you learn that there's no air drag and there's a quirk where you can jump again before friction can take effect. so that's all well and good. but bunnyhopping is of limited use without a way to build up the speed to maintain, and while rocket jumping _is_ a powerful option for that, it's committal and resource- and location-dependent and only something you can really use when you find yourself in the golden opportunity for a sick outplay. so there needs to be a bread 'n butter tech that builds up speed for the movement to have that signature richness, and a lot of games decide to make it ... removing your finger from your _go forward_ button, doing a weird little wiggle in the air, and strafing against your wiggle. while maintaining your bunnyhop, because so much as a frame of friction can obliterate your newly obtained speed and sure, advanced movement tech in most games ends up just being weird engine jank like that, but like. compare that to the wavedash. to wavedash, you jump, do the universal mechanic that propels you in any direction at high speeds but puts you in a state where your speed quickly decays and leaves you inactionable, then angle it towards the ground so that you cancel that state by landing, returning your normal friction and reducing the time before you're back in your actionable idle state. it's something that takes a lot of practice to get down reliably ( especially with melee's lack of buffer ), takes even more practice to start getting the most out of it, and relies on understand how several unrelated mechanics interact, but it's also just ... doing the air move that's fast but then goes slow, and stopping it before it goes slow in the same way you stop most air moves. you hit the ground to do it so you aim the move at the ground and you do that by aiming your stick to the ground and you get the most distance by maximizing your horizontal speed while still hitting the ground as soon as possible, which also means airdodging as soon as possible also logically lets you do the best wavedashes. it's based on all these things that might not occur to a player just through playing the game, but bring it to their attention and it all makes the same sort of sense as combining rocket jumping and bunnyhopping for a burst of speed maintained for far longer than a normal rocket slide. and it's all _infinitely_ easier to grasp than moving in such a way so that _the dot product of your acceleration vector and your velocity vector does not produce a projected velocity vector that exceeds the speed limit, yet they still add up to result in a longer resulting velocity vector_ yeah. that's what you're doing when you airstrafe. that's not getting caught in the weeds of how a mechanic works mathematically vs. the more obvious behavior it's trying to model, that's literally just the entire mechanic. if you've tried to learn airstrafing and just couldn't get a feel for it, then ... uh, brush up on your vector math, i guess? this is why i don't really think the comparison to anime fighters really tracks all that well, because while anime fighters are defined by their over-the-top speed and frantic positioning and rich movement ... they also just let you tap a direction twice in the air to initiate zoomies. initiating zoomies lets you pull all sorts of shit like mindgames, microspacing, instant overheads, four-way mixes, pseudo-divekicks, fast landings, and all sorts of nonsense that fighting games can choose to ( or accidentally ) include to make for incredibly versatile, powerful, and skillful movement, and it all starts by tapping a direction twice in the air and the resulting change in character momentum. the base utility of the maneuver is easy to grasp, easy to utilize, and easy to practice, and all the advance tech stems from taking full advantage of what that basic mechanic naturally allows and what how it combines with other easy to understand mechanics. if anything, an arena shooter that takes more directly from an anime fighter _would_ likely have an easier time at succeeding, owing to allowing players to do all the zany movement shenanigans through controls that actually make sense to the human brain. also, just imagine all the sick shit you could pull with a fast fall in an arena shooter mind, for as harsh as i'm being on airstrafing, it being a movement tech in an arena shooter ain't an immediate mark of doom ( esp. since doom doesn't have it in the first place ). it's in tf2 and is a vital part of practically all of the game's advanced movement, and yet tf2 is anything but dead, despite all the damage caused by valve's lack of attention 'til recently. but in a sense, it also _isn't_ in tf2, because movement in tf2 is nothing like quake. bunnyhopping is just flat-out _gone,_ so the only way to maintain absurd air speeds from rocket jumping and airstrafing is to set up chain rocket jumps, forcing you to eat away at your health and the rockets in your very limited magazine. and even when you _do_ pull off these fancy-shmancy rollouts like some olympian god of self-harm, your reward is just ... getting into position faster. which, like, that's _very_ powerful in a game like tf2, don't get me wrong, but it's still strictly a positional advantage. the ensuing combat you're trying to reach is still gonna start with your and your opponent having the same resources as if you just arrived by walking ... except not even that, because you just used a bunch of health and rockets to do all that and so your _opponents_ are gonna be the ones with the resource advantage unless you land next to a health pack or medic and have a chance to reload before engaging an enemy. all the while, a sniper or heavy could walk out of spawn, see you zooming around, and clip you in the air and suddenly you're a long way from the ground with absolutely nothing to show for it ultimately, it's a perfect storm of fuck that makes something like quake ill-suited for mainstream ( or even niche, but still v. popular ) success, with map control being so powerful and weird unintuitive physics jank being a major factor in controlling the map. and, unfortunately, too many arena shooters are too caught up in the nostalgia of when quake was the hot shit to realize that forcing players to use uncomfortable legacy jank to properly interface with the genuinely interesting element of map control is just gonna result in trying to captain a ship that has already sunk. and it's also honestly kind of boring? quake movement has limited application in actual combat because it's really just kinda basic without building up speed beforehand or outright blowing yourself up, so it largely boils down to busywork to optimize between clashes. and i don't think it really needs to be explained why a competitive battle game where you can get absolutely clown on because your opponent is _way_ better at shaking their ass during the downtime is not a particularly appealing concept
good video man, great job! shout out to my homie Enki, seen him fraggin' out in some quake clips.
Great job on this video!
This is a great video, and you are right it is a real shame, these games could be some of the greatest competitive games of all time and yet they die out
Reasons arena shooters failed: 1. skill issues Thanks for reading my blog post. Great video also. I really enjoyed the edits and whilst I disagree with some of the points you brought up, I still think they are very reasonable and would be great ways to boost the acessibility (and, hopefully the popularity) of arena shooters.
Thanks for this, brought me straight back to Quakelive times and Clan Arena, the best mode and sooo fun. Gonna boot it up now :D Must see.. again thanks! More arena shooters!!!
I personally think the push in the 10's towards 'advanced movement' played a big part in killing off arena shooters. They began feeling fundamentally different to play for long-time fans, while also alienating new fans by widening the skill difference between top players and new ones. You could do some level of advanced movement in quake too due to engine oddities, but it wasn't nearly as big a focus outside of higher skill levels Also, there was a kind of charm to it when it was unintended? I don't really know how to explain that feeling.
great vid. miss arena shooters. UT and Quake were my outlets. ill have to check out those mentioned at some point when i find time.
Found one more that would be nice to try out. Warfork! Basically quake live but they added wall jumps, that you can either use to reset your downwards momentum for wall jumping, or you can use it to make a complete 180 turn without losing and momentum. It is entirely tied to the long jump cooldown tho.
Growing up I played the quake 3 arena campaign over and over and over trying to finish all the maps on all the difficulties. I liked having to figure out the best paths I could against the computers. I remember playing against xero on nightmare for a whole year before I could beat him and that was the most satisfied I had ever been with a video game
Referring to 16:00 with set wep placements, Excessive Plus solved the issue of set map spawns by giving players specific weapons depending on what config was loaded. Railgun was busted af though. Overall skill gap still became a glaring issue later on...
If you're familiar with it, skiing in Tribes is another example of a movement mechanic that allows for a great deal of competitive expression.
Quake 4 also has fantastic sliding, very underrated as a multiplayer game.
Without being impossible to use for players without 1000+ hours in the game :)
To be honest it seems to me that shooters have been moving to slower cover based "realism" from the very start. Every ID software "hitscan" enemy is an early example, and games like COD and CS are when it really came into fruition. I do think arena shooters could make a comeback, especially considering how obsessively modern gamers will grind to "git gud".
I guess the problem as stated in the video is that once there is a number of 'gud' players after the first few months, arena games become progressively less fun for casual players as they're so skill based.
The issue with modern games is Big influx of players, it's fun, people don't know how to play and are figuring it out, everyone has fun, overwhelmingly positive. Some people filter out for whatever reason. Staying players improve, and improve. New player comes in? Met with a wall of everyone who was playing the game already, leading to noobstomping which isn't fun. They then leave. Not enough new arrivals to offset the player shedding means the population dwindles, only the most hardcore players remain. They fight each other over and over. They get bored of the meta that's absolutely required to win now because of both playing the meta at such a high skill level. They ragequit and now it's a dead game with nobody for those new arrivals. Dead game. People optimize the fun out of it. Half the options aren't viable choices to be even remotely *good* against the population, if not a good 70%.
great vid. tons of nostalgia.
Q3A was my fav game when i was a kid, i spent so many hours on that game, ditching christmas present opening to continue my match. such a good game
Quake 3 was an amazing game and still is imho. The fast adrenaline pumping gameplay was awesome. Then there was the modding community. Modders were uploading custom maps and mods constantly. I spent many many MANY hours exploring custom maps. People were so creative and funny. From a Tron dm map to the Britney Spears Castle there were so many maps out there it was crazy. Good times. 😊
Great editing, this is a really unexplored topic. I feel like if fighting games can come back from the brink, arena fps can too. Looking at games like Ultrakill I think there's definitely an audience for this type of game to be made with a modern and polished framework. Also yeah half the people playing UT/Quake are genuinely like 30 years old, hopefully the games don't go with them.
I MISS DIABOTICAL!!! It had so much style, aesthetic customization, and community support! It was a fresh face for the tiny AFPS scene and it attracted a lot of new blood, including me. I remember competing in community tournaments and met some really cool people through 1v1s and streams. The custom maps were some of the most beautiful ive ever played in a game with a map builder; it really spoke volumes for how passionate that player base was. I was so sad to hear the creator stopped support some years ago, and now it's lost to time :,( Is anyone still playing it?