That’s the problem right now Pod. There’s lots of newer twitch games out there but none are really special and they are mostly just variations on multiplayer. Stuff like Warsow, Nexuiz or Xonotic are all basically the same games as I understand. Big deal rockets do 90 damage instead of 100 and their speed is altered. Armor absorbs 90% damage instead of 50%. Changes like that aren’t too interesting and don’t change the core gameplay. That’s why each one of these games has a small community of players and never takes off. If all the new games are similar I predict the same results. They need to do real changes with different mechanics. Some elements can stay the same but there needs to be something new and exciting too. I also think a big factor many are missing is single player and cooperative mode which could add a lot of appeal to the game beyond just the hardcore multiplayer crowd. There hasn’t been a twitch FPS game to rival Doom yet in the single/coop department.
IMHO, but I have nothing to back it, very few people want to play arena shooters. The people that want to play arena shooters already have these games, and is a genre harsh for newbies of just people with poor skills.
On Call of Duty MP, you can run and gun, and maybe kill the best guy in the server 3 times, because a lot of it is pure luck, maybe being on the right place the right moment (you can make a bot that just spawns and drop all grenades, withouth walking, and it will farm XP and make frags). So people with bad skills feel better about themselves. But in a arena shooter, a person with bad skills will get humiliated, with a score like 100-1. Are very pure skill based games.
People are willing to play basically the same game forever (see Counter-Strike, see WoW, see LoL, see DOTA) and enjoy they for a long term. Even on games that benefict from a big collection of different maps (like battlefield) people usually love and play more 1 map over the others. So I don’t think lack of variety is what stop people from playing ezQuake or Xonotic, … is suspect is other stuff.
I think Cliffy B is just trying to relive his salad days, like the rest of us aging Gen-X’ers. Hopefully, he won’t drag his bunny suit out of mothballs and drop some Limp Biskit lines on us.
As long as he does it holding his ‘big gun’ i can’t see the harm. I’d still not buy one of his games/rails-shooters though, yawnsville…it’s 1994 again!
I’d have a lot more respect for him if he ‘grew out of’ the Dudebro and made some stuff like this:
I dont give a shit what he is like, if it’s a good game I may like I will buy it if not not interested the whole personality stuff really is irrelevant
Oh wow, really? Why don’t you go spam the CoD topics too, those games could really use a good dose of ‘feels’.
Believe it or not, some people prefer dudebro games to the touchy-feely ones.
It’s like we live in a world where UT2K4 doesn’t exist. Wait; we don’t. (Checks GoG game list). Whew. Yeah, I was pretty sure that the ultimate fragfest shooter had already been released 10 years ago. Worried myself for a minute there.
Ask Nadeo about how their “pure skills FPS” is doing, Cliff.
He’s been talking for a while about trying to escape the dudebro thing and make games with more emotional content. Given that, I’m a little surprised that an arena shooter is the direction he’s choosing to go.
Come on, Shootmania is a bad, bad game. I was going to say mediocre, but no, “mediocre” don’t convey it really.
That’s not exactly the same thing though. Shootmania is more along the lines of just instagib isn’t it? When I think arena shooter, I think weapon and health/armor pickups, where players need to learn how to run a map properly which is something you haven’t had to do in a FPS in a while.
Instagib is more skill-focused than normal mode.
It’s one shot = dead so you get “deadly ballets” with players circling each other. If you miss you are most likely dead as the opponent can shoot while your gun is “recharging” for a second.
Also the really good players already estimate where the opponent might come from and shoots in that direction ideally catching the other while that one comes around a corner.
If you are the flag carrier in Instagib CTF you will need a lot of skill to escape the enemy base avoiding being shot. It’s a lot more frantic than normal mode.
Just watch a “CTF_2 Face Instagib” video on Youtube or “CTF_AndAction Instagib” for giggles. (A small room with the flag on opposite ends. Players respawn either on their side or the enemy’s.).
It’s total chaos but still people manage to cap flags in there.
Instagib is different skill focused. You don’t need to know how to run a map to play instagib wll, and there is definitely skill involved with properly running/controlling a map.
There’s a decent amount of skill in learning how to run a map but after you learn it, there’s not much left to improve on. It’s basically a route over and over, matched to set item respawn times. The real skill is in reacting to your opponents. In duel it’s easier but in the chaos of CTF/TDM/FFA it quickly becomes impossible to keep tabs on everything. However it would be better if there were some deeper mechanics to it. A good example of this is comparing to megahealth (+100 health powerup, which ticks down back to 100h) in Q1 to Q3. In Q1 this item respawns once the person who picks it up falls back to 100 health. In Q3 it’s a set time on respawn. Thus the Q1 version is way more interesting and leads to many different situations. It’s also much trickier to time and control it; especially if you are trying steal it. If you look at all the recent Quake/Arena game clones they don’t do anything differently at the core gameplay level, it’s just boring same same stuff we’ve had for decades. If someone can finally think out of the box and reuse some elements of what made twitch FPS great but redo others which are stale I still believe there’s a great opportunity for gaming greatness in this genre once again.
From what I’ve seen, in the highest level of competition it’s the map control what wins games. Of course, maybe that’s the case because everyone at that level have already super aim and super movement skills.
edit: oh look, a Quake Live finals from some hours ago