>>1014949 There's a simple reason arena shooters (quake3, unreal, and.... what else?) died - they weren't fun after a while. I know this might shock nostalgia fags here but the gameplay itself is competition first, team coordination second, and "fun" at the very bottom. It was tryhard central, and the most fun I had was during early days when the server was populated mostly by average players, with 1-2 above average on both teams. You can shoot, miss, fuck around, try getting the lightning gun, die and try again. But once you have a railgun god no-lifer join the server, you might as well quit. Because he alone dominates the entire game and you can't do shit against him. Oh and good luck if he was with his clan on mirc. No fun in playing the game then. Once you had one tryhard join in teh entire server dynamic changed. You too had to tryhard just to stay alive and play. Oh and once those tryhard clan force maps to be just 4 of their favorite comp maps, that server is gone forever, No more longest yard, temple all day. No ctf, dm only, for their daily server clearing. Ctf servers lasted a little longer, because the objective means you can atleast camp or contribute in other ways than raw skill. So atleast somewhat fun. UT was way more fun than q3 simply because of weapons, but even it failed to innovate its stale formula of shoot faster, move faster, get items first. Its other game modes slowly faded away too with the loyalists only prefering the "meta" weapons, "meta" maps. Actually this pattern repeats in every Deathmatch game that focused on raw gameplay alone(unless you had a really chill server). Same shit with latest Xonotic. The same autist loyalist purist "I want a REAL arena shooter NOW" fags took over and everyone suffered. Fun for the first few days, then tryhards joined in, no-lifer drama started because they take the game way too seriously. Fun disappears, new players disappears, the supposed loyalists go back their q3 server with 5 players. Newer games with "unbalanced" gameplay replaced them, ironically. I experienced this first with Cod2. Bolt-action rifles and smgs were nothing infront of a shotgun or panzerschrek, you were actively discouraged to tryhard. Because being a server vet means nothing when a single rocket or shotgun destroys you, Im sure UO players feel the same with their vehicle and all the fun they had. There was a comp scene in cod2 too but it was very niche. Finally competitive gaming. It didn't destroy fun in arena shooters, but definitely accelerated it. Scrims and scrimfags everywhere. With the biggest and most fragile ego. The most fun I had with quake3 was in a ctf server with most chill and average skilled players who talked shit and weren't taking game seriously. That's were I honed my fps skills and im afraid it'll never happen again with new generation

>>1014976 That's not a game problem, nor a nostalgia problem, that's a pride problem, but if you can't stand people better than you, just play people worse than you. I like playing my betters, it helps me improve.

>>1014976 Aren't a lot of those issues with competitive games in general? Mobas are just designed to make you hate life, Popcorn/Hero shooters get fucked over with meta and esports, Fighters post mid 2010s focused on bringing as many people to a "competitive" level as possible, even card games stop being fun once you start optimizing around the meta. Fun as competition can be, there's a reason that mostly casual/capable of being enjoyed casually games have become pillars of the medium (ignoring DOTA/LOL). Dedicated servers would absolutely be a step in the right direction to combat this, and it baffles me that people know about the concept, and believe it's a good idea, but there's no push for bringing it back from devs or players.

>>1015000 Eventually, the competitive shit trickles down to the less popular servers. You have the mid-level players being fed up so they go to the lesser known servers, eventually getting better at the game, and then dominating the servers and the cycle repeats. >>1015005 >Dedicated servers would absolutely be a step in the right direction to combat this, and it baffles me that people know about the concept, and believe it's a good idea, but there's no push for bringing it back from devs or players. It comes down to either incompetence, laziness, and/or greed. While it is easy to have it so that anyone can run their own server, there is also the issue of finding out how to actually search for servers in-game. You could have a server-tracker that contains a list of servers, but that in-effect centralizes the game somewhat and kind of defeats the purpose. The only other solution I can think of is have a webring like solution where each server has a list of other servers and it keeps searching from there. You also have to deal with the issues of mods and other things that private servers might provide. Should they run server-side or client-side? If client-side, should the user have to have them preinstalled or should they be downloaded to a temporary directory? The other problem is that it's easier for normalfags to just have matchmaking servers instead of a server browser. Some people just want to have a quick round before going to work/school or just recently got into the game and don't want to spend time researching about which server is worth joining. And finally, you have greed. Some devs/publishers just want full control of the game, and the whole culture war/cancel culture makes it worse. Simply put, there are some people who think you should be banned from a game and it's "community" entirely if you "fuck up". These people don't want a "middle ground" where some people can have their own servers where they can do what they want without bothering anyone else. It's what you get when you have literal activists in higher positions of your company. Another part about wanting to have full control of the game is wanting to have all profits relating to the game to go to devs/publishers and them alone. People could run dedicated servers for profit (implement in-game ads or microtransactions via scripts) and that bothers some publishers who want all the profits to go to them.

>>1015005 Everything has better players than you and worse players than you. If games stop being enjoyable for you once you start optimizing around the meta, just don't play competitive people. I play competitive people because I find optimization and competition enjoyable and don't mind losing.

>>1015021 >The other problem is that it's easier for normalfags to just have matchmaking servers instead of a server browser. Some people just want to have a quick round before going to work/school or just recently got into the game and don't want to spend time researching about which server is worth joining. One doesn't necessarily have to exclude the other. One main matchmaking server hosted by the devs plus private servers for the people looking for some sense of "sekrit club" or other type of community, everyone wins (theoretically). >Simply put, there are some people who think you should be banned from a game and it's "community" entirely if you "fuck up" Tell them to go eat shit then, everyone was a noob at some point, everyone has bad days, everyone has done some extremely dumb shit. >People could run dedicated servers for profit (implement in-game ads or microtransactions via scripts) Surely there's some copyright jewery that would allow them to shut it down. >>1015034 I enjoy competitive and theorycrafting optimizations sometimes, but generally prefer breaking from the meta than participating in it or optimizing some stupid strategy instead.

>>1015036 >Surely there's some copyright jewery that would allow them to shut it down. Technically, it would be EULA jewery. Only game I know that did this was Minecraft and even they eventually changed their stance on it because some realized that servers do cost money to run (personally, I don't know why they just didn't make it be donations-only for servers). And even then it was mostly to protect themselves from being blamed for some kid stealing their parents' credit card to buy in-game items on a server that Mojang doesn't even run and is therefore not responsible for. https://web.archive.org/web/20140920224811/http://notch.net/2014/06/literally-worse-than-ea/

>>1015005 >Aren't a lot of those issues with competitive games in general? I was thinking the same thing. >>1015034 >If games stop being enjoyable for you once you start optimizing around the meta, just don't play competitive people. Anon, it has nothing to do with the meta. It's the fact that the comeptitive scene sucks out all the fun any game ever has. That everything about the game's design now has to be centralized around a handful of players that don't actually care about the game being "fun". This has effected the fighting game scene the most to where you cannot find a single game out there that doesn't stray from the standardized Street Fighter 2 formula in it's design, mechanics, and play-style. The only real exception was Smash and it's clones, but even THOSE have fallen victim of this problem with Smash removing almost every single game mode and the clones falling victim of making the memes of "Fox only, no items, Final Destination" a reality. The reason people hate competitive gaming has to do with the fact that they have no life outside of the game, and they're going to ruin every other game that exists by demanding that developers conform to them because they deem themselves to be the "sole judges" on what does and does not make a "good" multiplayer game. And the companies still putting out games will do everything these people say because they're the ones who are paying for the Battle Passes and microtransactions that keep these companies afloat.

>>1015085 >It's the fact that the comeptative scene sucks out all the fun any game ever has. Man, I feel that. Experienced that with TF2 myself with Uncle Dane and his bullshit ideas of trying to overwatch-ify TF2 spreading to other places. Plus the infamous nerfs to fun weapons like the Caber and the Panic Attack. Also have a funny example of that with a recent fighting game. In Granblue Fantasy VS Rising, a foxgirl char called Yuel has a unique stance as her gimmick that she can go into off of several moves or enter manually. You used to auto-parry non-low moves while in stance, which was really funny to use as a guessing game thing and you couldn't even get anything off of, gal was pretty low-tier too due to most of her gameplay relying on confusing people rather than more typical neutral play. They scrapped this and made it a manual parry (that now works on all move) for the sake of balance. And while they buffed a ton of her other moves and made her an ultimately better character due to how it's easier to play into her stance attacks, she lost a lot of her charm to many who played her and there's been constant complaining to give her the auto-counter back. She's more balanced at the cost of the fun of her meme counter. >>1015094 It's not that losing isn't fun inherently. It's getting clowned on with no feeling of recourse or a fair match that isn't fun. The thrill of the fight itself can be plenty fun but if you're getting hammered into the dirt the whole time there isn't much fun to be found. However, if you can get a foothold and learn something with each loss and slowly improve, or at least have close games where you still feel like it can go either way, the matches can still be very enjoyable. Of course that's a mindset usually used with fighting games and actual sparring/martial arts but it applies to most competitive sports. Winning is still preferred and nice, mind you, but losing doesn't outright have to be unfun.

>>1015097 >Of course that's a mindset usually used with fighting games and actual sparring/martial arts but it applies to most competitive sports. Winning is still preferred and nice, mind you, but losing doesn't outright have to be unfun. I just refer to how Hardy LaBel designed the multiplayer in the first Halo game. Where he did not track if the players win or lost a round, nor why. All he cared about when designing the multiplayer was how quickly they were to play again. If the guys in the office stopped playing after a couple rounds, then the game wasn't fun and he had to fix it. However if they kept playing the game, then he knew that he was on the right track. Mr. Soccer Guy used the same philosphy when designing a lot of the earlier games at HAL. Where every now and then, the staff would bring in their kids to "play test" the games and use the kid's reactions in order to improve. However he has since admitted that it's no longer possible to do this because of design schedules and everything else.

>>1014976 >and "fun" at the very bottom. Hell no. I'm gonna be honest anon, you just think this because you are bad and never achieved flow state in the game. If you choose to be sad about this or not, it's entirely on you and it's understandable, but do note that a large majority of the population is also unable to reach the flow state that is so rewarding with high skill games, and it's why the large majority of the population just doesn't enjoy games like that. (I could diverge here and mention the general prevalence of skill diminishing in games as evidence of that) Arena shooters, rhythm games, precision FPS, fighting games, high skill ceiling games in general often lock you in the fun aspect only when you're actually able to perform inside them and are able to realize how well you're performing, you can get pumped without smashing noobs, and for most people their fun begins and ends on "oh my god I got a kill!", but to TRULY feel the fun in those games you need to actually DO the crazy shit you see people doing, you need to actually respect your own skill and perform the coolest fucking shit and feel great that you did it, it's the adrenaline rush of doing something awesome and being in the zone. You not understanding and being unable to reach this key aspect of fun does not remove its existence from the game, it merely makes you part of the unskilled majority.

>>1014976 >and "fun" at the very bottom. git gud

>>1014925 >Did Call of Duty kill arena shooters? No? Call of Duty made arena shooters more popular since it's a normalfag game.

>>1014976 You've essentially said what the anon you're replying to did with his last two sentences, but in six paragraphs.

>>1014957 >The other bit about skill is pretty self explanatory. High level players who know the maps, can pull off reasonably good aim, and mastered the game's mechanics are 100% going to ass rape a new player. Combine this with the prior fact about game variety and new players have little reason to stick around and take that beating (unless the game really hooks them). If you don't mind dying a lot at first, even as a complete newfag, it can be pretty fun to ruin serious business gamers' days by killing them with cheap shit. Counterstrike was great for that. I was never one of those guys who chased a high K:D ratio, but after a while I started getting more kills than deaths by just running suicidally into firefights with the pump shotgun and a grenade and taking the chance on getting a lucky head shot around corners while they are distracted by the more serious players. It turns out that if you break the serious gamers' rhythm their fast-twitch alone is not usually enough to save them when somebody does something that they do not expect. I never put together any long streaks doing that, but I didn't let guys get long streaks against my team either. Being a suicidal wrecker is a fun way to keep the no-lifers from ruining everyone else's good time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rsI6CUPu0s somewhat related to topic here, talks about how players get funneled into tryharding, compfag, getting kills become the only measure of improving in a game. And how this chases away any fun or fun seeking players. Why newer players are increasing taking upon attitude of leaving as soon as the game is not swinging in their favor and being a non-committal attitude in playing. I partially agree with his solutions though. He did identify the problems correctly, but his solutions aren't feasible.

"Competitive isn't fun," "tryhard," and "no life" are a secret retard code for "I lose because I'm a stupid no-IQ-having motherfucker."

>>1018198 I agree also I love gay people and the State of Israel

>>1018198 Depends on the game. Metagaming isn't fun, and if being competitive requires that, then fuck it. No items, Final Destination, Fox only isn't fun. And sometimes it does sort of come down to just being too competitive, even if you aren't "no items, Final Destination only." Like games with multiple characters where, if you're competitive enough, you might find some are "broken," or some are underpowered, but to a regular player, these things aren't noticed. Or in team games where you're expected to pick a role and play that role very particularly the same way every time. This might make you better at the game, but it's more fun just to play with people who aren't competitive enough to ever get to the point where those strats become important.

>>1014925 I am not convinced that CoD or any particular game kills off any genre or competitor series. It is more the problem of publishers and shameless trend chasers looking to copy the popular thing for a quick cash in with their soulless trash clone games. Most of the times it fails blowing up in their faces because these people fail to realize that people would rather just play the real thing instead of some lame knockoff. So the problem is more that they really didn't even want to try to keep arena shooters being a thing. A lot of Quake and Unreal fans are going to be pissed hearing it but their games were never as popular as they thought either. The audience to get for any mainstream publishers was always the console audience. Goldeneye 007 was far more influential with the masses than Quake, Unreal or any other PC shooter ever was. This is why Half-Life got so popular for a bit despite being at the time PC exclusive. It was single player focused and slower pace. It was marketed very well. The game seemed like it had way more substance to it then mindlessly jumping and shooting everywhere. This is why today Half-Life is likely to be praised way more as a series than any deathmatch focused arena shooter for the PC. However Halo absolutely changed the game for a short period. Why did it do it? Because it was a console focused arena shooter with a slower more tactical and team based approach to the concept rather than high speeds and deathmatch focused. But more important then that Halo tried to sell people on its story and campaigns at least at first with multiplayer being a complimentary and secondarily but still huge part of the franchises appeal. I am thoroughly convinced in my mind that Halo could have still succeeded had it never or only very incrementally strayed from its core roots but not to the point where the core identity is destroyed. Microsoft probably fearing the strength of CoD as a successful franchise felt the pressure and most certainly forced Halo to change for the worse. I can completely see why Bungie wanted to be done with it all and move on to Destiny when they did. They at least back then were a company that enjoyed their creativity and did seem to genuinely want to make good games regardless of what any anons or anybody period thinks of past Bungie and the Halo brand. You don't have to like Halo but I feel like the old Halo games only keep shining more and more as great games from a past era we won't get to see again. The vast majority of hate was just unwarranted butthurt from whiny arena shooter fans with a false perception that Halo was killing their favorite franchises when as I said before, arena shooters actually weren't even all that popular to begin with. So this is a long post and it would take too long to get into Halo's XBL popularity at the time. To keep it short, CoD DID NOT actually kill Halo in the way people think. The Halo brand was still very popular at the time and H3 even enjoyed plenty of time as the number 1 played XBL game even when the first MW came out. >tldr Basically no single game ever kills another competitor franchise or genre. That is the people themselves that are involved in the making of these games. Arena shooters mostly were never actually all that popular. Halo was a massive success and could have sustained its massive popularity had it stayed true to its core identity even if perhaps it was inevitable it would decline. I don't ultimately know though its just my opinion on the matter. And I apologize for grammar mistakes. Sorry I only got a shitty American education. For the record also I do not think Quake and Unreal are bad. I am sure they were great fun back in their heyday.

>>1014925 But anon think of all the funni clips you get with cod :^)

>>1014925 XDefiant is kill https://archive.ph/SMnkb

>>1046421 >lasted only six months I guess all those rumors were true. I wonder how much of this was due to them avoiding a steam release.

>>1014949 >>1014957 >>1014976 But RTS require have an even higher skill floor, require astronomical levels of autistic tryhard optimization, are even more dominated by 500 APM veterans who have been playing since the late 90's, and are even more symmetrically balanced (at least in arena shooters you get shit like quad damage to mix things up and give noobs lucky kills) and they're still more popular than arena shooters. At least AoEII still sees many new players and still gets plenty of new DLC with the Definitive Edition.

>>1046452 > At least AoEII still sees many new players and still gets plenty of new DLC with the Definitive Edition. The successful new RTS have all been single player focused.

>>1046421 <guys I bumped a thread from a bottom of the catalog!! Regardless, another fat turd in the lap of Ubisoft. I forgot this game had even released. >>1046528 They Are Billions sold millions and it doesn't even have a multiplayer mode.

>>1046452 >>1046528 Yeah RTS games survive on casuals playing the singleplayer which eventually attracts more to the multiplayer. Look at the latest DLC for AoEII and you will see the biggest part is about single player campaign stuff. You can't even use the new factions in ranked multiplayer (only unranked).

>>1046647 It isn't even a new thing, most of the genre's playerbase have always treated RTS as a singleplayer thing. The vast majority of WC3's users never touched Battlenet. RTS focusing on diehard gookclick shit is what "killed" it. Killed in quotes because RTS games still come out and some are still popular, just that ones that don't try catering to the microscopic esports playerbase; those guys all left for MOBAs over ten years ago and they've never coming back.

>>1046652 I partially disagree about that, it isn't only single-player, it's custom games too. Mobas wouldn't have existed if they weren't already popular as custom games in said RTSes until that point. A good single player campaign is definitely very important, but custom UGC and user freedom is also great for an RTS's health as well. RTS map editors were some of the earliest places where creators, developers and modders got their chops and people love playing and seeing all kinds of cool shit. Things like tower defenses, RPGs, survival, tug of war, card games, gag "porn" games, etc. were all present in Starcraft for example.

>>1046647 RTS survive as a genre because it's pretty much the only genre that does "Top down view controlling multiple units on a tactical level". The only thing that comes close is turn based strategies and some 4X games, but they're very crucially not real time usually, or their scale is far too large. Arena shooters died because there are a million different shooters to pick your favorite type of, from RPG shooters, competitive shooters, realistic shooters, arcade shooters, etc. RTS pretty much is a one trick pony that will stay alive as long as there's people willing to go play it, not just casuals playing on single player which attracts newbies to it. I'd say the only reason RTS isn't as popular is simply because it's not talked about enough and there was never any that managed to breach into overblown popularity like other genres had, the closest we have to "the normalfag RTS" is either Age of Empires or Starcraft 2 and this is telling.

>>1014925 Splatoon is an arena shooter too and it's not going away

>>1046854 Not going away from here with all the Inkling nudes on /v/.

gonna say that quake maps and mods are miles ahead from the doom ones.

>>1046864 Quake isn't really a pure arena shooter like III is. Also not really? Better than Doom 2's maps sure, but Quake had a really messy and chaotic development with the whole project being restarted halfway through and a lot of its maps are just "okay" as a result. And I'm wondering if this post is just bait on the modding front, Quake's mods are nowhere near as well fleshed out as Doom's. You don't see anything like Fallout: Bakersfield or Selaco with Quake.