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Comment by Legion | Hacker News Reader

I am mourning the death of the non-respawn multiplayer shooter.

Counterstrike, as another commenter pointed out, is still the third most popular game on Steam. And yet, every major FPS franchise has moved further and further away from that model.

SOCOM and the Gears of War franchises were probably the two biggest non-respawn online shooters on consoles, and the latest iteration of both has instead put respawn pandemonium front and center instead.

Nothing beats the tension of a shooter where you don't pop back to life 0-5 seconds later. It makes players more likely to work as teams, and it compels players to act with self-preservation instead of running around like damn fools.

I miss those experiences. Hell, I'm playing MW3 because Search & Destroy mode is the closest I can get these days, outside of hardcore PC games like ARMA (which I would probably love if it didn't run like garbage).

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If you're not totally sick of CS, CS: Global Offensive comes out sometime next year on PC, 360, and PS3. You could also wait on Tactical Intervention, a new game by one of the designers of CS with similar gameplay, but I was in the beta and, um... it was really bad and broken as hell, and seemed flawed in ways that it may be hard for them to fix without having to rethink the game.

I agree with you on respawns in a lot of ways, but I think there's ways to make things tactical and tense without them. TF2 did a good job of this by at least having respawn timers, whereas MW3 is a complete joke - I can't play it except for in S&D because every time I take time to set up a flank or get behind cover, someone on the other team spawns behind me and catches up.

Mods like Action Quake 2 went even further, back in the day. Not only was there no respawning in a round, you were even not aware of who (allies & enemies) died during the round. So all you had to rely on was that which you heard or saw.

Of course back then, nobody used Ventrilo so that system wouldn't work very well today.

I played AQ2 a lot (Still have that 'Lights, camera, action!' sound somewhere). I'm pretty sure that you _could_ see who of your team was dead. And in my experience, most of the AQ2 sessions happened on a lan party w/ a bunch of people in a BNC connected room full of machines anyway. Ventrilo... ;-p

AQ2 was nice, because

- no respawn while a round was active

- hit zones (head = bad, legs could break)

- bleeding (you need to bandage yourself, sometimes _fast_)

- instant kills were possible with ~all~ weapons. Standard pistol to head, one shot. Throwing knives (My favorite!) to head -> Dead. Knife to stomach? Chuckle, run - he's going to bleed to death w/ a 80% chance.

- equipment/weapon selection at the start of the round a la 'classes', but more free. Giving you stealth (no footstep noises), protection (armored vest), better/more weapons/ammo etc.

- nice variety of missions and settings

I'm pretty sure you couldn't see which of your enemies were dead. Not sure about your own team.

Did you ever play the AQ2 Single Player mod? We basically put a bunch of standard Q2 monsters at interesting locations on the AQ2 maps so you could practice against them. Was quite popular after a while: a team of half a dozen people modding for pretty much every AQ2 map out there.

No, never even heard about that one. I remember that we tried several bot implementations with AQ2 at that time, but quite frankly - they sucked. Either it was boring (since these guys were just too stupid) or impossible (if you add enough bots that 2-4 _have_ to notice you if you take down one).

Maybe I need to search for my installation of Q2 again and give it a try on a slow weekend day ;)

I loved AQ2. It was such a great blend of unforgiving gameplay and over the top action. The bleeding and kicking were awesome elements. I also liked the low amounts of ammo. Reloading meant throwing away whatever was left in your current clip, so you were always balancing risks.

These things came together to create some wonderful cinematic moments. I remember one, during a clan match: I was the last member of my team alive, almost completely out of ammo, with three remaining on the enemy team. They rushed into a room to get me. I managed to take down one with the last bullet in my gun, then kicked another out of the room, causing him to drop his hand cannon. I whirled and threw my knife into the face of the third, then grabbed the dropped shotgun and took out the second as he ran back in. I think I had to take a break to recover after that, haha.

I also remember AQ2 not showing which players were alive on either team. I distinctly remember games where I'd use the radio command to report in, only to be met with complete silence... and suddenly realize I was all alone.

Even as a long time CS player, I still prefer AQ2. I'd love to find a modern game like it.

Death of it? There was Counterstrike, and then...?

Call of Duty has a mode similar to Counterstrike (without buying weapons, but the respawn style is similar enough).

I never got into Counterstrike, so maybe I just missed the whole genre, but every shooter I've played in the last (almost) 20 years had respawns.

Rainbow Six.

This. I used to spend hours planning out the team movements through the level.

Dying or being incapacitated was easy (usually 1 shot in most places) so the only way you could really win was to coordinate very well. You'd be given a map and plan the movement sequences of each team through the level. When you gave a specified "gocode", that team would advance to the next checkpoint by running through a corridor or entering a defended room.

Then, you'd interleave the paths so that in larger rooms you'd have multiple teams enter simultaneously for maximum effect, because otherwise your team would usually get bottlenecked at the entry point and die.

Oftentimes, one of the teams would fall behind or die because of bad planning (or insufficient information while planning). But you'd have to keep going anyway, often with disastrous results. This taught you about failure modes and planning with redundancy.

It also taught you about winning the war before it happens. You never ever ever ran into a room guns ablaze. That's a good way to get your entire team killed, and probably the hostage that you're trying to save. Instead, you have one person open the door, another chuck in a flashbang and more to cover you while you get in through the bottleneck. In any reasonable amount of time it would take for your enemies to react, they'd be picked off already. And hopefully the other team did the same on the other side of the room. The whole thing took under 10 seconds. Not much left to chance or shooting ability.

I miss the old Rainbow Six. Obviously I don't shoot people for a living, but it was one of those games that actually taught you something.

One of my favourite games in the last decade, Natural Selection, does this really well. When you die, you are put in a respawn queue, and you respawn from infantry portals. The more infantry portals your team has built, the faster the queue is drained, but also the more resources you've spent doing so. There's also a rather expensive option the team commander can trigger that will bring all dead players back to life all at once.

It's a nice way to get people playing instead of sitting around watching, but at the same time placing a cost on dying that simply doesn't exist in most multiplayer shooters today.

There were others before it, too.

Action Quake 2 (and its spin-offs, namely Action Half Life, and its creators went on to make CS), Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear, Rocket Arena (in all of its incarnations), The Specialists. I think the Existence HL mod did this, too?

There are also a number of games that restrict spawning in other ways, mostly by spawn point or territory control: Gloom, Natural Selection, Day of Defeat, Battlefield, etc.

> Death of it? There was Counterstrike, and then...?

Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, America's Army - pretty much the entire "tactical shooter" genre until some of those franchises started moving in on the console casual market.

Not to mention the two console serieses I already listed in the post you responded to, both of which moved multi-million units serving up non-respawn multiplayer.

World of Tanks.

Try Battleground Europe.

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