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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.

There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.

I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk

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Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting!

I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.

I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.

Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.

But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.

The only other map that started in a non-CS game that I think has even a slightly close level of fame would be COD Nuketown.

As much as I love all the maps you mentioned, and could probably sketch their layouts from memory, I think Rust and Nuketown from the call of duty series are probably better known by a wide margin. Rust has been featured in 3 different games that had a combined sales of over 2 billion dollars, but even that is small peanuts compared to Nuketown.

Nuketown has been featured in six different games, with 17 total variants of the map existing, and 8 different game modes that are Nuketown maps 24/7.

I’ve played neither Counterstrike nor Call of Duty, but I know de_dust2 by name and can even visualise what it looks like, and I’ve never heard of Rust or Nuketown.

Rust was more of a brawl map than the others. Lots of 1v1 fights, but no where close to the playtime of the other two.

If we count the Nuketown map on Call of Duty mobile (mobile has over a billion downloads) I would have to say that's the winner, but if not de_dust2 is the king. Mirage would also be pretty up there.

Yeah, same was true of me until a couple of years ago when I started playing call of duty with my younger brother to reconnect. At least for me, PC gaming puts me in a massive filter bubble in terms of what you see and hear about, and call of duty, which overwhelmingly sells to consoles, has always been viewed sort of derogatorily.

I think on the flip side, most of my brother's friends I played Call of Duty with probably haven't heard of counterstrike, or Quake, or unreal tournament.

By "six different games" do you mean six practically identical re-releases of the same game?

Man if you saw the endless wailing and gnashing of teeth about every single change that happens iteration to iteration you'd be astounded.

The two subfranchises, modern warfare and black ops do generally feel substantially different though. Modern warfare is generally a slog, but black ops can be quite zoomy, especially now that Raven software is working on them.

That's just gaming. It doesn't matter what developers do, some portion of the playerbase will be mad about it. Nerf a thing, someone gets mad, don't nerf it someone else gets mad. I'm sure some people will get mad at both options.

COD can be fun, but to me it gets boring quickly.

cs skins are pulling in a billion a year nowadays.

Yeah, the CS skin market is pretty crazy, but its still no where near CoD sized. Black ops 6 turned over $3 billion in revenue, and black ops 7 is expected to sell higher yet.

I find the yearly release model exhausting, honestly. Some people only play Call of Duty and still spend more per year than I do on video games.

Yeah 2fort damn, servers been running 2fort only games 24/7 for decades...

I feel like halo was never really big outside the US, I would guess unreal tournament, quake, DoD, CoD, battlefield, all were quite popular in the whole west

Halo was defiantly big outside of the US. I was prime age for gaming when Halo came out and Halo was the most talked about game and everybody loved it.

The X-Box was less common as the first X-Box never really sold all that well. But Halo came out for the PC as well and many people played it.

Halo wasn't even ported to the PC until 2003, and wasn't well regarded or played much.

It even had a Mac port. Supported both PowerPC and Intel! Though yeah--I'm not sure how many players it had. It's just neat that it happened.

I have fond memories of 2fort. Desperately wanting to play TF1 on a 14.4K modem from Germany - no European servers meant playing with 500ms ping, which made aiming completely impossible, so I took the pacifist route each time by picking the scout class and then trying to steal the flag unnoticed by coming in through the sewers. It worked sometimes when the server was only half full.

I would just play as medic and camp the enemy spawn room, infecting them as they spawned and watch as they passively infected their teammates. It was great fun (I have since grown as a person). It wasn't long before the enemy spawn rooms would instantly kill you if you entered.

FY_iceworld maybe, if we count number of rounds played?

q3dm17?

q3dm6

fy_pool_day

My absolute favorite was always fy_pool_party_v2 I think it was called. Such a perfect map. Every position had a number of elite advantages but also drawbacks.

Poolday was definitely a de

was de but named fy and no one planted anything :D

There have been days where 40M people played Fortnite on a single day. I'm kinda out of the gaming world a bit, but I did not believe when my nephew mentioned it, but it checked out. Given the age range of people who still actively play it, I'm not sure if they've even heard of de_dust2.

I pine for a time pre-CS, pre-QWTF when dm4 would have been top dog in the most played map.

We probably had more fun on death32c though.

The most fun one I've used is that it is my home environment in VR. In 3D it is a weird feeling to walk around and see how all the old sight lines are. I still duck a bit walking past mid doors :)

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21021...

Whenever I jump into CS I only play dust2. It’s such a perfect map.

I also have a soft spot for Aztec because of the rain. I would join empty servers just to hang out on Aztec for the aesthetic.

Dave Johnston also has a write up on his blog, for those interested: https://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/making-dust2/

I'd like to throw Facing Worlds in the ring...

Yes. I miss how wildly creative shooters used to be. In just UT[2K4] you had the translocator, the shock rifle (with a hidden third firing mode), and movement like wall jumping.

Always enjoyed de_dust more than de_dust2. But I am clearly in the minority on that one.

I also liked de_dust more because a well executed T rush to site A was as fun as it got on random servers before voice chat. Was awesome when it all came together and everybody worked together.

I vividly remember the thrill of taking out the entire T rush to site B myself in about two seconds during a clan match (not that high level ;)). It was like dominoes falling down in a neat row. It was quite unexpected to rush to site B; the other four of my team were already at site A.

It was way too CT favorable, dust2 offered more balance.

Only if terrorists pussyfooted around instead of rushing a.

Majority of the team rushing A, one bunny hopping like mad with an AWP to the tunnel..

Well, not just FPS games. It got ported to Assetto Corsa[1], which is a driving simulator.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yeh5vFG1GK0

I really don't like how modern games are played on just a handful of fixed maps where players go through the same memorized motions thousands of times. The way we used to play Quake back in the day was that we had hundreds of maps and played one after the other maybe for few rounds at most. We were coming back only to very few bizarre and fun ones. Game involved finding yourself out in your new environment. It engaged spatial intelligence.

Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.

Rust and NukeTown are iconic maps from CoD. At least for younger folks like me who grew up on Xbox.

I still don't get how dust2 became more popular than the original dust.

Sniper battles from spawn, and no nade hallway of doom?

Yeah just tradeoffs I guess. I mean at one point you could get a kill and buy a mac-10 first round if you were lucky enough.

Mostly balance issues, I think. Balance matters in pubs.

If dust had the underpass-stairs option from the beginning, and maybe moved the T spawns forward by 1 second, it probably would be just as popular today.

I can't recount how many times I've bunny hopped out of spawning on de_dust2.

I'm pretty certain that there are modern FPS's that have gotten inspiration from that legendary map.

I was thinking that really the article should have been about dust2. By far the most enduring map of any game ever created.

Blood Gulch from Halo has to be up there, they remade it in a few of the other games due to its popularity.

After De_Dust2, the Jungle Warfare map in the first Ghost Recon game that has a special place in my heart.

I'd love to see actual data on most-played maps across all FPS games

Facility must be up there.

> If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.

I gotta imagine that sucks to play in most of them. Maybe it occasionally 'works' in another game?

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