The legacy of fy_iceworld, Counter-Strike’s divisive, popular custom map (2020)
rockpapershotgun.com
rockpapershotgun.com
Couldn't agree more. I have a lot of fond memories of playing on stupid custom TF2 maps. In most ways, game development has gotten more accessible by miles over the last few decades, but this is one of a few ways it's gotten less accessible. It's easier than ever to make a full new game, but it's become impossible to make a single simplistic map for an existing shooter that your friends actually play.
I thought it was half life
Science and Industry was a fun mod as well. But yeah I also remember CS ad being at another level right away.
Then there's Ricochet.. :')
Someone else mentioned “natural selection” as well
Gosh, it's still around, and its web site looks identical to how I remember it looking 25 years ago! https://quark.sourceforge.io/
I believe Hammer has actually been out for more than 2 decades now. I certainly recall trying to recreate my school as a de map.
Apparently this sort of thing didn’t go down so well in the USA…
Counter strike global offensive still has a level editor. Though yeah fewer games nowadays ship with the community servers and mod tools you need to have that kind of organic community. Guess its mostly a problem with the changing monetization strategies where you want to sell microtransaction cosmetics which probably couldn't compete if someone could get whatever goofy modded cosmetics people added to their servers.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=38917...
Community servers on the other hand.. those have almost all but vanished completely. It's pretty much just Valve games as far as AAA goes, and even they do their best to hide their server browsers now.
Unfortunately, it just seems like you can't aggressively monetize free content so the industry in general has moved away from allowing it.
I wouldn't generalize it like that
Basically gaming splintered, hard. So you end up with people, both living and playing games during the exact same time period, having radically different perspectives on the state of gaming. It's really interesting if you draw parallels between this and the state of bubbles within society in general.
[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/933480/Enderal_Forgotten_...
Mapping and modding was never generally available to console gamers, and they've traditionally made up the vast majority of game consumers because high end PCs were much more expensive since PC gaming was a thing.
The only stuff you could genuinely expect a home gamer to do is something like cracking your system protection in the ps2+ era or going ham on the GAMESHARK.
CS:GO : allows both custom maps and community servers
Dota : allows custom maps, some of which have created and radically changed existing popular games like auto chess did to Hearthstone.
These two games which are in the top 2 have more hours played than the next 8 games in that ranking.
I certainly love them though! I'm still holding out hope for Source 2 SDK and Hammer 2 to actually become a usable tool outside of VR or Dota 2.
Facepunch [0] (Makers of Garry's Mod) are utilizing Source 2 with Valves permission and everything they're working on looks pretty promising, with great potential for a new era of modding.
It's based on CS so it has all the same weapons and mechanics.
It has an active modding community that has added every map from every game you've ever played (including iceworld, but so many more)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=11392...
I know something will replace it eventually but it has been my all time favorite game for the last 5 years or so.
typical pl_badwater fan vs average koth_trainsawlaser enjoyer
my guilty pleasure was 32v32 fast spawn on the usual payload and a/d standards, with regulars it is a very fun format. Yes, it is highly spammy and teams generally run multiple combos, and that changes up the tactics a lot. A pair of krubered demos (two combos) can break through (mk V.battlefield.wmv) or you can have a really dynamic playing field with very frequent pops. Multiple sentries are common on defense... but you have the krickies. Or you can use short-circuit engineers as minesweepers. With 32 players actually there is a lot more flexing between classes and a whole class of multi-combo plays that become possible, it is a lot of fun on a pub server where anything can happen.
Custom maps (like the one 32v32 all-custom Topnotch clan server) are often balanced better for a larger number of players, but, 32v32 payload was a very fun and intense game format, it's all the fun of pubbing (fun bullshit loadouts because there's lots of room to flex) but just more focused and dynamic. Can you pull off some weird bullshit that pops both their meds? fuck it go for it
The late-game balance changes (iron bomber, air strike, parachute, combo pyro nerf, everything) really all made the game worse in the name of "e-sports matchmaking" that never materialized. I would like to go back to the Love and War update plz, but keep the airblast changes and maybe a very few choice others, but that was peak funhaving and then the nerf bat came down for fun and meme loadouts to make the game "good for esports". Give me TF2014 plz, nocrits.
The decline of the self-hosted instance is tragic, when most of the newer games are gone they're gone. You will never get The Division back or BF1/BFV/2042/etc. Oops server rental program gone. Enjoy ur singleplayer battlefield experience.
Sadly it's also the only way to fight the bot plague, what Valve has allowed to happen to TF2 is disgusting. Can't wait for everyone to migrate to Team Comtress 2.
I once read someone call Touhou "the closest thing to an open-source fandom" and of course there's the "do they make touhou but for BOYS? -> TF2" meme and honestly that's very apropos too, TF2 is one of the latest and most advanced multiplayer games before things really went off the rails, and it's one of the few you can selfhost, it is a common cultural heritage in the way that very little will be afterwards. And now the source is leaked. Behold the strange death and eternal life of team fortress the second, born october 10th, the 2007th of our era. It will outlast hats and inventory and all of us, a powerful memeplex and a really good game.
I do look on it with such mixed emotions though because hats were the prototype for knife skins in CS:GO and that perked everyone else up at the giant wheelbarrows of money steam was bringing in, and that eventually destroyed AAA gaming. TF2 was gambling but it wasn't that predatory (ok grandpa).
I mean yes Valve literally does measure player arousal/stimulation to calibrate the Director in L4D but that's just good game design really.
Hey wait
Amen. I was playing a lot of pyro around that time, getting really good at the airblast + flare combo. Then the update came around which completed changed airblast physics and nerfed a bunch of stuff (imo needlessly) and I stopped playing regularly shortly afterwards. I still run a couple of servers to this day with third party bots but haven't fired up the game for a couple of years now.
Didn't particularly like mann up as a) it costs money for each tour and b) it heavily incentivized you to win by giving you the chance to win a expensive shiny golden gun, which in return made players just develop some meta which they religiously sticked to and vote kick you for deviating from it even a tiny bit, or god forbid making even the slightest mistake. From my experience most players were in it for those items which they could sell for a profit, actual fun be damned.
Or please explain what you mean about how an mvm only enemy ruined casual meta somehow(?). I’m confused there
Before the proliferation of unlocks the game played a lot tighter as an actual game, let's say pre-2011/2012. 2011/2012 to 2015-ish is the saturday-morning cartoons period.
And I'm not saying either "serious game" or "silly little game" is better or worse, just that there's a bit of a tonal shift between, say, the pyro update and pyromania, right?
2015-2016 is maybe the tail of the cartoon period, that's pre-matchmaking, but also they started to have some bad ideas (iron bomber, parachute, air strike, nerfing combo pyro, etc) that made the game overall worse imo. Just a matter of taste but that's where they started circling the drain in design terms and going after some of the fun meme stuff, then later the e-sports thing came in and ruined it.
I think the irony is that the e-sports game they wanted in 2016 is already there, it's the game they had in 2011. But you can't take away people's unlocks and their hats, the things they'd pivoted to with casual made the pivot back to e-sports a lot more difficult, it's a lot harder to remove weapons from the game even if they don't fit what you're trying to make anymore. At best you can try for the "comp/casual" split (not that the split they ended up doing made any sense - 6v6 with no weapon/class limits? 12v12 with funhaving loadouts nerfed? that's the worst of both worlds) but the comp/casual split fractures the community too.
I think the other part of the problem is it's tragically unhip to have a 2007-vintage arena shooter as your e-sports title in 2016. I've heard the take "musk didn't want to own twitter, he wanted to own a network with twitter's size/reach that works and behaves completely different in every way". And tbh Valve didn't want TF2 to be an e-sports title, they wanted a title with TF2's userbase and reach that played completely differently from the thing they had spent the last 5 years turning it into. And then they took the CS:GO devs and tried to cut away the funny meme stuff and turn it back into a serious e-sports game and now it satisfies neither side.
But anyway yeah I completely get the feeling that TF2011 is a thing that a lot of people would like to play too, before things got too silly and too much about the hats/less about the actual game itself. I just also think that's really the serious e-sports game that Valve really wanted in 2015-2016 and they didn't know it.
Would love to see both TF2011 and TF2014. Hell TF2007/2008 would be funny too, let's have 6-pipe demoman and sentries you can't move (pyro kinda needs airblast though).
(actually the Xbox 360 version is frozen in time, because Valve refused to pay Microsoft to validate updates... it has the very first update because you get one free and welp guess that's it!)
average lime scunt main vs typical loch n load enjoyer (oh no I already did that bit)
I loved LnL+sticky+Persian persuader… play with stickies since you have plenty, save the LnL for spamming chokepoints (which is fine since regular GL explodes on impact too) and busting sentries, grind on the engineer’s dead buildings and turn it into three full-health packs.
Wanted more ammo? We had a tool for that: it was called “dying and going back to the respawn room”.
I get that scouts hated the OG two-shot LnL (with a chance of a 1-shot-kill) but scouts also control the engagement because of higher mobility, everyone used atomizer which gave triple jump even while using another weapon (before that was later nerfed), and you get one more jump than I have shots. Plus it’s specifically a “fuck that one class specifically” loadout with a large downside of having to actually hit your shots instead of rollers, and half the ammo loaded. I know that’s a controversial take but LnL was fine imo, if you push the fight and I land two direct hits (or your number comes up on the first pill) on your high-speed mobility class with triple jump that's a mistake on your part. If you want to make it nospread so damage output is fixed and it's guaranteed to take 2 hits... that's fine too, nocrit+nospread is better overall imo.
Same for Pyro. He has a flamethrower and a shotgun, if you as a scout choose to run in and force the fight over open terrain against a pyro who knows you're coming... you die. You can still kill him with two meatshots with no chance of response if you flank him unaware, the flare gun moves slow enough you can dodge. To not die to the shortrange juggle class, don't approach the shortrange juggle class with your mobility class. Skill issue, you have a pistol if you really need to plink on him, he either needs to land flares or use the shotgun, you 100% have the control of the engagement at all times right up until you let yourself approach and be juggled.
But yea modern scorch shot is busted, I think that one's just not fun for anyone, I don't feel good about just blind spamming with AOE fire grenades that block a choke for a couple seconds either. Not sure the current weapon design is saveable for that one, I run it too when I play pyro (because all the rest of pyro's combos have been stripped away) but it's basically a better version of the detonator in the sense of being horrifically annoying to play against for zero effort on the pyro's part. On the other hand, it also forces snipers to at least occasionally interact with the rest of the playing field.
The two I’m really torn on are rescue ranger and short circuit. Short circuit used to be actually fairly important for clearing stickies/etc, I’d use it plenty myself on offense pushing out of the gates etc, even as a demo main I felt it was reasonable (up until you got like three of them just vaporizing everything while they repair or rescue ranger). It went through a number of variations and I’m not sure any of them felt super great but it also did something kinda important and the class is otherwise very weak offensively (except for other unpopular weapons like mini sentry). Not that I like a couple turtled up engies vaporizing my shit but like, uber a heavy or a couple snipers with charged machinas to alpha-strike it, 2 charged shots on a sentry is instadeath even if they're swinging wrenches. That was always the charm of “silly little game” TF2, no matter how fucking lame a given strat was there was always something you could do to break it with an even sillier strategy.
Until the vaccinator came along that is. Like god it was decent to start with and was just buffed incessantly in the last few years. Oh you can trivially swap resists to block any class/loadout variation made to counter you, even pop multiple resists at a time, and oh also the charges now follow the patient so you don't even need to keep healing them? Yea just keep buffing it that's great /s. Meanwhile quickfix was done dirty, airblast immunity on uber was a situational strat for pushing on ramps (thundermountain, upward, etc) and you were vulnerable to damage to offset that, just shoot them till they die (damage, my one weakness!). That was fine, what was the problem?
Rescue ranger is another tough one to balance. I kinda feel like you shouldn’t be able to run both Short Circuit and RR together, that’s maybe a little too much mobility and tankiness for sentries especially when you have a couple engies. Forcing engineers to commit to the nest or walk the sentry out by hand is not a bad thing imo. Maybe that's a thing like the Equalizer where it really should be two weapons - the "repair gun" and the "teleport the sentry" gun... or just not have teleporting sentries.
Iron bomber should not have existed though, non rolling rollers are not a good gameplay idea, but whatever. Same with air strike and the parachute… just doesn't play well overall.
But that’s what I mean is all of the worst decisions came in the last few years of TF2 development. Jungle Inferno was 2017 and the last few years of decisions before that were already downhill, you got scorch shot, vaccinator, quickfix nerf, iron bomber, airstrike, tons of completely random shit that wasn't needed and actually added balance problems in a lot of cases, matchmaking/casual, etc.
2014-2015 was pretty much the apex of “silly little game” TF2.
I need to start backing up random pages like this.
I remember making friends across multiple age groups in community servers that you could always come back to because someone was kind enough to lease a server for a few bucks a month.
I remember young people creating levels ranging from totally silly to awe inspiring or a combination of both and more, and not to discount other modifications either.
I can only imagine it must be product owners or IP managers somewhere in the org chart saying, "No, we should completely own the join server experience end-to-end," etc.
Not at all the same thing as the community-created content of old.
Roblox is an entirely microtransaction-driven experience, you create games and publish them on the developer's platform so you can charge players for things and make money, not because you simply want to create something for people to enjoy. The developer is in full control at all times and can decide to remove your content at any time.
Minecraft is fundamentally a sandbox game but that's also not really the same thing. You can still run your own servers with your own mods on the original edition but that's just a remnant of the past and Microsoft wants to get rid of that as soon as possible so they can force you to play their version of the game where you pay microtransactions for servers, skins, maps, etc. And besides, most popular java servers have their own set of microtransactions, and there's no server list, so generally you either host your own server for a group of friends only or join a large existing server.
Compare all of this to the classic Valve game concept of loading up a level or script editor because you have an idea and want to make it a reality so other people can enjoy it, not because you think "I can make money out of this". You release your content on the internet for free, others download it, load it up on their servers, and it's now playable by anyone in a few clicks. Players open up a server browser, scroll through a list of servers, pick one they like and join, and suddenly they're playing a player-created map, on a player-hosted server, with player-created plugins providing gameplay and general quality-of-life features, together with other like-minded players. The developers had basically no control over this entire process beyond hosting the server list. No (alive) game released in the past decade replicates this experience because it's simply not as profitable as having full control of the game.
Well people can treat Roblox like this, they don't have to. My children are part of several gaming communities on discord that share and tweak their games 3d models and lua source... There's a ton of people developing just for fun and growing communities on these platforms.
COD4 was incredible, could change pretty much everything about it, custom maps, modes, models you name it (here's one I worked on back in the day https://www.moddb.com/mods/cod4-minigames).
I agree Roblox is a cesspit of overly monetized P2W experiences, and minecraft from what I've heard has most its audience on micro transaction (p2w) based servers.
As I mentioned in another comment, fingers crossed s&box can bring back the glory days. Although I worry there's now been a shift in how people play, and the "why" people build things (money, versus personal gratification / fun), similar to how the same thing has happened on Youtube (most people don't seem to create for the fun of it anymore, but rather to make money).
It won't, because it's just trying to be Roblox. You don't create maps, models, or scripts that can be mixed and matched or modified by server owners as they please, you instead create entire self-contained "games" that are then published on a game developer controlled platform and played via a matchmaking service, and the developers have expressed interest in implementing monetization systems directly into the game which means almost every game will be pay2win just like Roblox.
And yes, the climate around content creation on the internet has changed a lot and that's one of the reasons why the "glory days" will never return, very few people still create for the sake of creating without thinking about getting paid.
I also don't think matchmaking will be a thing, it will be dedicated servers just like gmod & rust. I will be extremely disappointment if not, was hoping we would begin to see 1000+ player modded servers on a game more built for modding from the ground up, as rust has began to experience.
The monetization is an issue, especially since they have no doubt had a taste of it in rust (through cosmetics), so I'm wondering how they can bring this in whilst still allowing full creative freedom, which would in affect make cosmetics useless outside of official servers (which you would assume would be the majority).
Might as well have said, “What about Skyrim?”
I do miss the days of stumbling upon all sorts of mods on magazine CDs or on FTP sites, for what it’s worth.
And it's getting easier and easier, just search Steam for "meme-games". Game development is more democratized than it has ever been.
Look what happened to music production, how easy it is to start with all the free DAWs and cheap hardware. I believe game development is going down the same road, as tools are getting more approachable for newbies, we're going to see an even bigger explosion of indies.
Man I can't wait to retire in 30 years, the games are going to be sick.
The game developers care, the problem is management as you said... for a multitude of reasons:
1. companies are afraid of a repeat of GTA Hot Coffee - basically, enraged parents shitstorming because modders (re-)added sexually explicit content
2. central servers can be moderated, whereas allowing users to run their own servers will lead to screenshots of chats where people drop n-bombs or go off brigading and other kinds of trollery, resulting in enraged people shitstorming and the legal department whines about brand safety (for good reasons)
3. having server code publicly available allows malicious actors to go beyond fuzzing in developing exploits and hacking users
4. you can't keep squeezing money out of users when they run their own servers
Arma 3 and DayZ Stand-alone.
1. Bohemia built modding into the games. Australians wanted to ban DayZ for a marijuana mod. The shitstorm was minor. And the game was never banned.
Most servers that try to use… distasteful mods… tend to die a fairly fast death once the novelty wears off.
2. Central servers are not moderated. Instead they use BattleEye, which is just awful (2 week lead time to bans, if they even get detected).
Because of that terrible anti-cheat system, it has actually lead to thriving communities which are actively moderated. Where all those sorts of behaviours you describe are often an instant ban offence.
3. Active community moderation deals with this. Check out AnarchyHD. Or check out this twitch clip of StevESP getting banned on stream https://clips.twitch.tv/KnottyResourcefulBubbleteaBuddhaBar-...
4. No you can’t. You have to grow your user base. DayZ recently reached a new peak in simultaneous player population. Almost 10 years later. This isn’t the first time they’ve hit a new peak over the last year or two either.
When you can join the same server every time you play, it becomes like a third-place, you see the same faces over and over and get to know people. You have fun, everyone is nicer to eachother because they know they will see you again, you pick up on their playstyles etc, a very rich experience.
Auto-matchmaking removes that entirely, every match is with randoms, and everyone gets depersonalized to a nametag and so people start feeling comfortable being the worst to eachother.
Community servers also allowed for small communities to build up around these small maps and game modes, garunteed there was a fy_iceworld 24/7 server where people used to frequent and get to know eachother. Surf maps are anothing thing that would never have happened without community servers/server lists etc.
Today I learned that Shipment from COD is modeled after fy_iceworld! I can’t believe I never put 2 and 2 together. These types of small, hectic maps are always fun. Halo has Octagon variants, COD has Shipment and Nuke Town.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/who-made-fy_iceworld-a-fore...
and most interestingly, there is a comment burried in the comments, admitting the he was the original author - and it checks out with the article. It was 15 year old Taiwanese guy. (Who is now a software engineer.)
1) Most (if not all) FPSs at the time (Quake 3, Halflife etc.) had respawn times of around 10s after death. Counter-Strike introduced the idea of rounds which only ended when your whole team died. Scenarios would often play out with 8 players dead watching 2 players camping out the round.
2) IIRC, the default round timer was 5 minutes. This promoted conservative game play which slowed the pace of the game, especially for new players. I stopped playing CS for years but when I came to CS:GO, it was so refreshing that the round timer had been reduced to 3 mins. I spent countless hours being dead watching other people play out rounds.
At least some CoD maps like Shipment, Shoot House and Rust have a bit more complexity, places to maneuver, and, yes, even camp for a short while. The biggest thrill is always rushing to the top of the tower on Rust, where you feel you have a clear advantage, and conversely, taking revenge on that pesky tower camper.
I haven't played fy_iceworld, but think that boiling that formula down to where there's absolutely no place to hide, removes any strategy at all, and staying alive becomes a matter of luck, rather than skill.
*RA3, a Quake mod which came out around the same time as CS, lowered the skill floor by giving players a full loadout of weapons and maximum health on spawn. It was good!
At the risk of overcomplicating an astute observation, I'd say that there are actually three aspects: game knowledge, maneuvering, and metagaming. That is to say that the ability to understand your opponent is fundamentally separate from one's ability to effectively foil them.
Iceworld embodies the platonic ideal of a maneuvering test by massively compressesing the total number of possible gamestates into a 3x3 grid of sightlines. The map itself isn't exactly a masterstroke, but it's nonetheless extremely impressive in the way that it manages to avoid collapsing into degenerate gamestates after jettisoning so much complexity.
Edit: not that nades aren’t useful in vanilla cs, but they perform a different fucntuon
From there I was able to find what I was looking for by browsing through all the ones with "texture" in their name. It was aim_ag_texture_jungle :) https://gamebanana.com/mods/105659
There are still a decent number of people playing gungame in CS: Source around me (apparently it's not as good in the newer CS:GO but I don't have that one). It's also mostly people in their thirties so a bit better vibe than when there used to be a lot of annoying people who sound like they're twelve - they mostly seem to be on CS:GO now (not that all teenagers playing games are annoying, just mostly the ones who are on the voice chat a lot).
Forcing players to a knife fight endgame is just so much fun.
I spent so many hours in high school and into college playing gun game in CS:S. It was very easy to just hop in and have fun. It was a nice alternative to the more serious, team objective oriented modes.
>This placement makes it extremely difficult to spend any money, which basically blocks off Counter-Strike’s central progression and loadout system while creating this funny risky incentive to rush into the middle before the buytime closes. 95% of the time, you’ll just get gunned down from 3 different sides. But if you’re lucky, you can run in, buy a grenade, and toss it into the other team’s spawn, and it feels like you’ve gotten away with something.
Not quite. You'd bind your buy script to a key, and after your team killed the last enemy you have a few seconds to run there and hit that key. You keep the grenades in your inventory for the next round.
I ran a few popular fun map servers, constantly experimenting with new mods, game/gravity settings, and rotating new maps based on community votes. There was a strong sense of excitement around testing out the latest custom maps, and even the quirky bugs added to the fun.
iceworld was great. Counter-Strike is a big game with lots of mechanics. Multi-round strategy. Sneaking. Shooting. Teamwork. Objectives. Etc. Iceworld takes all that and focuses on basically a single thing: peeking + shooting. It's great.
I love the history of MOBAs. Warcraft 3 was a big RTS with hero units. Hero units are cool! What if a game focused on just them? This led to hero arenas and eventually DOTA. In Dota you only control the hero but there are still some automatic AI creeps.
Dota is cool. It has lots of mechanics. Hero micro, map control, leveling, gear, solo fights, jungle, team fights, etc. What would be neat? What if there was a mode that focused just on team fights! Forget the first 20 minutes, all team fight all the time. Behold all-random all-mid (ARAM)!
Counter-Strike and DOTA have extremely high skill ceilings. They're also very punishing games to poor players. iceworld and aram lower the stakes, increase variability, and decrease downtime. They're all action all the time. And even bad players can get some kills and have some fun.
I love seeing how a game can produce a mod that becomes a full fledged game which becomes a bonafide subgenre... which gets its own mod and the cycle continues. Beautiful.
There was another really popular Starcraft custom map (genre, really) called "Commandos" where you had a constant spawn rate of marines and could upgrade them into various things; I always thought that was a super fun mode, but it never materialized into a larger genre like Tower Defense and MOBAs did. I wonder if there's a missed (latent) opportunity there?
Rampart[0] has entered the chat.
Fun times anyway - I remember playing endless rounds on fy_iceworld during LAN parties in 2006 and 2007.
Both are played with the same game mechanics, but play very differently. In turn, both have a very large audience for different reasons.
Many players played for fun, so they would play team games e.g. 4v4 where skill still mattered but often the results depended more who you got on your team (I think that to a degree this is why MOBAs are so popular - in theory you get close to a 50-50 winrate, or at least win like 30% games even if you are bad).
Some players enjoyed a map called "Big game hunters" (or BGH for short) where you didnt have to care much about resources - they were abundand in your starting location. So you didnt have to think about building new bases (big part of regular StarCraft gameplay). In fact even more simplified "fastest" maps were made, where resources were stacked near every player's starting point and the map was basically a square with some choke points. The layout was simplistic too. It could still be fun and better player wouod still win. But again most players played team games like 4v4 where you could always blame your loss on your team.
Then the players played a map called "Blood bath" that was incredibly small - so games could be shorter (few minutes), since players would often "rush" (=attack quickly) each other to win or lose fast.
Those simplifications that removed part of the main game loop were still fun. Often by making the game a bit easier. (Although I remember some challenge between "regular" players and "BGH" players wherr BGH players won, since they know how to play BGH and they were good enough to win on a regular map).
Then StarCraft Brood War had thousands of custom games, which had deep ability yo customize the game and a primitive programming language - that allowed to completely change the way the game worked. MOBA genere, turret defence - all came from StarCraft Brood War custom games. I think that apart from Warcraft3 no other game allowed so much custom maps from the stock (without mods). In Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 you would just download the custom map and play it.
Starcraft 2 never managed to get custom maps as popular due to Blizzard's mismanagment: no custom game list. Also Blizzard was probably trying to monetize custom games/maps but failed.
Designers often ignore that (1) there are bad players that still want to win sometimes even due to sheer luck (2) some players want relatively braindead simplistic fun.
I think in Fortnite they have a popular custom map that is a big square arena where both materials and ammo are infinite. Again a simplification, but at the same time a lot of the essence of the game is still there (shooting and building).
I also remember really enjoying these “Champions” customs where you had one strong unit that was modded to be even stronger and you had to progress through a map of obstacles and enemies. It totally took the resources/build part out of the equation and just focused on movement and combat.
IIRC, the entire MOBA genre was actually spawned from a Warcraft 3 custom map (the original DOTA?)
The bummer is, we can still play the single player campaigns of Star/Warcraft but those days of weirdo custom maps are likely gone for good.
It’s true that it was Defense of the Ancients (or more properly, the DotA Allstars variant) that birthed the MOBA genre.
This thread has shown me how active and deep the Starcraft custom community was.
I was always more of a Warcraft guy so that's what I was exposed to but it def makes sense that SC would be just as (or more) active.
Not sure if they work with the recent SC remaster, but I think there was some kind of debacle around it with Warcraft Reforged? It might have been patched in by now.
Players still play custom games but it is harder to fill lobbies now.. especially if you need more than few.
I remember "zergling blood", samw for those RPG games or microcontrol maps.
There was a map called "The Unknown" which is the same idea as in Among Us game. It was so much fun.
Warcraft 2 to Starcraft to Warcraft 3 is an interesting heritage for League and DOTA that I haven't thought of. This is what happens after 20 years of purebreeding, gross it's deformed and toxic towards humans.
And then the MOBA genetics was crossbred with Team Fortress 2 to produce... Overwatch. A hideous shell of its former self both mematically and in gameplay. Twisted and evil, a dark and toxic degeneracy of the gameplay you once knew and loved.
It's pretty sad to think how generous games used to be to their user base. Both in terms of content and what you could do with that content. Modern games are a much more controlled experience and I think we're all worse off for it.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/evitu7/warcraft_3_re...
I played a handful of custom games that were pretty fun: zealot football and aiur chef were great
In the same vein I would like to give a mention to the Mac game Marathon’s Waldo World Arena.
1. https://h3hota.com/en/templates#xl-u-templates/jebus-cross
I've been working on my own game based upon this style of simple map. I intend to feature this "4-box" layout as my primary competitive arena.
I did come up with something even simpler - a single box in the middle with spawns on opposite corners. Sometimes iceworld is a bit too big... The only logical simplification beyond this would be an empty room with spawns on opposite sides. I am absolutely going to look into what this might play like as well.
Hoping to have something to show HN later this year.
Much like the original source files for most of Counter-Strike's old custom maps - most likely lost and gone forever.
Now we just gotta figure out what the Nipper maps led to :P
https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/images/2020/04/yang_fy_i...
> Why the map was prefixed with "fy_"? Because he didn't know how to put custom texture into maps, nor leave his signature. The only thing he could do was renaming "cs_iceworld" to "fy_iceworld". "fy" stood for "FantasY". He made a lot of maps prefixed with "fy_".