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Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

I started with CS: Source and quickly got into 1.6 because of the more expansive funmaps and modding scene. It was like the Wild West (or literally as was the case with de_westwood) - Nipper's penchant for glitchy drivable vehicles, ridiculously huge maps with teleports galore and weird music, fy_iceworld, gun game... it was so wonderfully weird. The fact that the core of the game stayed the same for so many years without DLC meant that people got good at it on their own merit without worrying about dropping money on upgrades or grinding long hours to get drops or whatever.

Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.

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You'll probably like this short series on fy_iceworld if you haven't seen it already: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-legacy-of-fy_iceworld-c...

But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.

I think there is still a huge market for this stuff.

An entire shooter based solely upon the principles of fy_iceworld & gun game would wipe the floor with most other AAA titles on offer right now.

Would they? Gun game has been an official game mode is CS for a long time, 2 of the maps follow the same layout fy_iceworld. COD had/has it as well.

I've even stumbled upon fy_pool_day recreation in Roblox.

Almost anything your nostalgia can think of is available "current" games like Fortnite and Roblox.

> Gun game has been an official game mode is CS for a long time

This official version differs quite a bit from the original gun game though and it is not as fun.

I'm pretty sure Roblox replicates this feeling

Modding and mapping were what made CS great in my opinion. Since CS:GO, Valve has been quietly killing that scene by making it harder and harder for people to find these game modes.

But to be honest, I think it's an artifact of our (or at least my) generation. I've played CS for thousands of hours, same with l4d and cod2/4, and I don't _need_ a battle pass, seasons, constant updates etc. Though when chatting with my ~14 year younger cousin about this some months ago, he said it'd be "boring to play a game that doesn't get updates". So.. different times :)

The disappearance of the ability to run your own Dedicated Server is a real tragedy.

What games even let you run your own dedicated servers?

These days? Not many. I’m sure there are some but probably one of the most popular that I’m aware of is Minecraft. There are quite a few custom server implementations alongside the official Java one.

Given the thread, I'm assuming their mostly referring to CS 1.6, but games like Minecraft are another example.

Factorio and Minecraft.

Mostly AA and indie game titles. The simulator scene is still going strong with dedicated servers (like squad, arma, farming simulator, the hunter etc etc).

Larger titles swapped over to more control in order to extract more money from the players, but also control the experience.

There is however some AAA titles every now and then which support hosting your own servers. But they're quite few these days

Many PC-only games do, more likely to do so the older they are. The newest I'm familiar with is Valheim.

I'm actually looking for Android (Kindle) game recommendations that are cross platform and allow self-hosted servers.

Battlebit, Valheim, Core Keeper, Minecraft, Enshrouded, Palworld, Ark

Rust!

Mostly non-AAA studio games. Then there's plenty of games with steam workshop or nexusmods support, even easier to mod these days as they use Unity or Unreal and you don't have to rely on an homegrown SDK release.

I don't think it's just "different times" as you put it. Those kids have had their brains ruined by companies' profit-maximization schemes. It makes me really angry (at these companies) and sad (for the kids) that they have been the victims of such a thing. Every generation before them could just enjoy things without needing endless novelty and updates, but they have apparently been robbed of that.

Quietly? They monopolized the modding community. There is a universe where gamers could sell their weapon skins, but now only Valve sells their own skins. They killed modders.

Actually that's a really good point on the skins aspect. But I think the community might be in a better shape if the dedicated servers were easier to find.

I miss surf_greatriver and its variants :(

There was also the whole branch of Surfing, which exploited a glitch in the physics engine that caused standing sloped surfaces to generate forward velocity. Flying around massive expansive maps gliding on slopes while blasting people with shotguns was so much fun (or sniping them mid air with an awp).

There was also a whole sub-genre of skill surf, with mechanically challenging courses to complete.

Oh and then kz maps too, which was just for climbing up huge structures.

Good times

When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.

I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.

I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.

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