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Comment by ZuLuuuuuu | Hacker News Reader

It is nice to see Quake getting some love from the publisher, but I feel like it is not enough.

A bit controversial opinion maybe but I really like Quake Champions and I spent a good amount of time playing it. I even bought some battle passes and merch to support the development. I was really sad that they basically put the game to life support just 1.5 years after its release. The game improved so fast during those 1.5 years, we were getting significant improvements with every patch. I always wondered how much more it would improve if they put just 1 more year into its development.

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With the failure of Quake champs, unreal tournament 4, and diabotical in the past decade, I don't think we can blame the developers for not trying hard enough. All three were great games (regardless of how nit-picky the players might be), and all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players.

> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players

This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.

It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.

They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

> Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.

If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time."

Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.

Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)

Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.

Overwatch too, but it got boring after a while and their matchmaking was atrocious.

Exhaustive list of team-based PvP games where people don't complain about matchmaking:

That's largely what matchmaking aims to solve, assuming you have enough players you can get a reasonably balanced match to drop people into.

Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off.

Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance.

Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.

I've given up on PvP. What I never understood was; if I "git gud" then all that really does is shift the "I can't win" problem to someone else. It doesn't resolve it.

Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem.

So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.

What about an Elo system where players get matched with players of similar skill?

I mean good PvP systems have skill based matchmaking so almost everyone is winning and losing 50/50. Though, that's harder to do if you have a small playerbase.

Even if you have a larger player base.

A person lower down the skill ranking has to put up with the flowing of higher skill people beating them as the higher skill person travels up the ladder to their skill point.

These aren't static systems.

> If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up.

Have you really though?

I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player.

The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced.

Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players.

Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.

In the 90s, almost everyone was still bad at these games (because they were relatively new as a genre), so the skill discrepancies were smaller. I was there, I remember.

When the skill gaps are smaller it's not as big of a deal to play "stronger" players. But when the skill gaps are huge, it becomes a real problem.

Skill gaps back then were HUGE. At least in the games I used to play and compete in. Mainly Quake, CS and StarCraft. If you were an average/decent player, you'd get absolutely destroyed by a good player every single time and it was never even close.

Modern FPS games with SBMM creates this huge "blob" of low-to-average players that will rarely if ever even have the chance of playing against an actual good player and they have no clue of how huge the difference in skill gap it is.

Popularity and quality are two very different things. There are many brilliant games that simply didn't get much attention simply because of luck or attention got dragged somewhere else.

I think games that are heavily reliant on online pvp are just always going to struggle with being more niche appeal. Matchmaking is hard to do well and consistently, and managing the skill/progression curve is hard— there's gotta be things in there to master, but also new players will never join if they're just getting stomped every game because they can never catch up.

This tension has arguably been a contributing factor in the collapse of the ARC Raiders playerbase, with a huge population who joined primarily to shoot and loot the robots eventually confronting the realities of a pvpve game, and peacing out for good after getting shot in the back or ambushed too many times.

Not just that but I believe that even those folk that have these huge hits don't really understand how they managed to do it. There just seems to be so much luck involved on top of a great product. You can have a brilliant game and still fail because it doesn't get picked up in just the right way.

Sort of like how Nintendo had the Wii, a huge hit but then almost immediately started to flounder for growth ideas as they didn't understand why it worked so well.

Unreal Tournament 4 didn't get a chance to fail because it was never a real release. UT4 was a free tech demo for Unreal Engine 4 that never got completed because Fortnite started taking off at that time and developers were deallocated from it.

And UT3 was definitely not a great game by anyone's measure.

It was never officially released, but it was on the front page of epic launcher for years, even after fortnite took off. The online experience was fairly complete and enjoyable (for people with experience) for ctf, duel, tdm, and team arena master. But yeah, epic didn't support it as much as they could have.

Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin.

The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.

But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s

The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.

Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time.

Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.

Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?

IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co.

It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.

Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve.

They're just all single player focused.

Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.

I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold.

It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.

Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.

I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?

afps is pretty dead. there are a handful of people on qw, q2,q3 but if you don’t wanna dig around start with the microtransaction feature quake champions or the quake re release while people are playing it again.

also shout out to banana shooter or straftat if you want a quick fix in a f2p game. it’s not really afpsy but pretty fast movement and wacky guns in both

For oldschool shooter experience you can just install Quake Live from Steam. You won't have trouble finding active servers in it.

I've never understood the appeal of the opposite. Modern gaming where you just play with different randos every round.

When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.

Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.

Xonotic has that old school feeling. It's an unfortunately tiny player base, and only a handful of servers with regular players. But if you are within ping of a busy server (like Jeff & Julius resurrection) you do run into the same people all the time, including the ones that run the servers.

Is there any community anywhere in life any more?

There really isn't, and I hate it.

All of the things you mentioned still exist, they are just not mainstream. And maybe that's for the best. Small friendly communities keep them alive, not companies that need to keep messing with a working thing in order to justify a monthly subscription or ad revenue.

>Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo

I'm sorry, what?

IIRC, Epic had (still has?) the source for UT4 available as they were trying to push community contributions, mostly on the playable content side but I'm fairly sure they had the core game there, based off what is now a very old branch of UE4. The telling thing to me is if there was a huge demand for it there was no significant effort to pick up the torch, or even do yet another 'spiritual successor'.

The source code repo is still on Epic's Github, not sure if everything else is that easy to get currently. The problem about picking it up by a 3rd party is the fun of getting approval on basically anything.

I compiled the project on a whim during COVID. It played okay. There was even a very small pool of players who had presumably just done exactly the same thing.

The people behind UT were reallocated to make Battle Royale mode for Fortnite which is the reason of the take off, not vice versa.

Twitch shooters are niche in the first place, and it has an even more niche player base that isn't majority American. I think it's a hard sell when 90% of the diehard community built their skill on Quake Live, which comparatively takes far less resources than Champions or UE4. Bethesda then switched the F2P status of Champs and Live, which was not a popular move.

Don't forget Reflex Arena!

while it’s the cpma 3.0 i always wanted its also bolstering 0 players and worth forgetting

I was gung ho to play Quake Champions, then the monetized the shit out of it and I fucked off.

UT4 was a tech demo.

I like to think that doom: the dark age is the quake 1 sequel we never got, I mean it has the doom name, probably for marketability reasons, but thematically it fits quake the first better, and it really fits if you include what quake was supposed to be before it was released as just another shooter, the only remnants of this planned quake are the excessive castles and eldritch horrors. Nether of which were present in supposed sequel. I think of it as three separate franchises bearing the name quake Q1, Q3/champions, Q2/4/wars

Well, this update doesn't mean much overall in the Quake scene, if you actually play it for the PvP. Quake Live has held it down since 2012-ish, and was always a free-to-play game.

Champions came out, most of the community from Quake Live stayed on live. Bethesda in all their wisdom made it cost $10, I assume to sway new gamers into downloading Champions (which they also made F2P shortly after release). So effectively, they swapped the F2P of both games, and the free one is the less preferred option in the scene.

> Quake Live has held it down since 2012-ish, and was always a free-to-play game.

They had subscriptions for a while.

Quake Champions was the Mortal Kombat to Overwatch's Street Fighter. I've only ever seen gameplay vids of it, but it looked a trip.

Was fun, the never ending pursuit of balancing game balance with adding new stuff just watered it all down with the glaring obvious detail: stop all the hero bullshit and just make us all equal. At least a mode for that. Instead, speed, armour, health was all varied and unique "balanced" in their minds against active and passive perks per character.

A lot of potential, killed by committee

The problem is there exists a version of Quake Champions where everybody plays equally. It's called Quake 3: Arena.

The thing is, Q3A was originally supposed to be a sort of primitive hero shooter, with the various characters falling into different classes: fast, lightly armored "light" characters, more robustly armored but slow "heavy" characters, and a class in the middle. This was scrapped before release.

Well, a lot of it found a home in Team Arena, but that wasn't particularly well received.

TA and its huge maps looked like id's take on Tribes without understanding what made Tribes good

That's a problem of every commercial competitive game. Endless tweaking and new content kills most games, they never reach their potential skill ceiling. Sometimes it comes out good, but that's more of an exception.

Quake 3 was kind of like Latin of the PvP world (together with SC:BW, CS 1.6 and maybe Tribes 2), its great quality was that it was abandoned and frozen while also being extensible. This let the community decide what they like best (for example CPMA didn't take off despite being great on paper, because it was breaking a lot of VQ3 depth by being too fast for the maps it was played on), and let the players truly master the game over more than two decades. I recently played some VQ3 with agent and had zero hope of keeping up despite being in the top few dozen of players a bit over a decade ago. He's still playing and still keeps his chess-grandmaster sense of the game (and trash talk).

You can't fight with the times. Kids want colorful mods, dance moves, and other stuff like that. Girls also play, they won't play things like the original Doom or Quake, and boys don't get to meet girls much if they are not playing the same games.

Twitch and arena shooters are just not popular.

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