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Comment by kingkongjaffa | Hacker News Reader

This article is dumb the modern pokemon meta is harder and more complex than when we were kids.

Fps on the other hand, I’m pretty sure I would smoke 99% of kids on halo3 or call of duty 4.

fpses since Call of Duty are a different breed. The Quake skill ceiling...just didn't exist. I'm not sure such a thing is politically correct now in modern games (read okay with management given they want to sell cheap dopamine, not adrenaline)

CoD/Val still have a skill ceiling most people will never reach, I sorta agree with you though, esp battle royale style games are only popular because you don't have to be good to win. In quake if you're bad you will never take a game off me, in Apex you might get lucky.

To play Quake or Counter-Strike competently, you have to use a PC, a keyboard, and, crucially, a mouse. A console controller can't hope to compete. And a ton of players play on consoles from a sofa, before a large TV. To capture this audience, the FPS games had to slooow doooown.

Don’t forget that many tvs also have horrible lag, even in “game mode”.

CounterStrike (back when it was an HL mod) was the last game I really got good at. And by good I mean "somewhat competitive people didn't hate having me on their team" not "I was the MVP." I sunk a lot of time into doing so.

I wouldn't say that, there definetly are FPS games with a very high skill ceiling. It's just that most of them nowadays have more of a mix of raw mechanical skill and tactical play (with team mates). Take Counter Strike or Valorant for instance which mix a high requirement for mechanical skill with lots of tactical thinking. Or games like Overwatch and Pubg where aim is still important, but cooperation and positioning will mostly beat that.

Man I should play modern fps games then. I hated the mechanical skill involved in older ones… I’d much prefer ones based on teamwork and stuff.

This is one of the things I loved about Overwatch when it was first released. You use a healer with a beam they locks onto people or a giant man with a shield blocking incoming shots, but you also had the soldier with his rifle and the archer if you want to take accurate shots and test your mechanical skills more. It really allowed folks with a wide range of FPS skills to play together somewhat effectively.

Here’s one of my games from years ago as an example of what the team gameplay could often be like in public matches: https://youtu.be/baz90mAkddI?si=LewykM57vcqniPUv

As someone who hasn't played a CoD game in probably 10-12 years, what has changed?

It changed from Call of Duty to Text of Duty.

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