[vehemenz]

> What I think of as the golden age of FPS games happened shortly after, in 98, with the release of Half-Life and Unreal.

I think there are two components to this: the quality of the games and the community. Modern shooters like Overwatch are amazing. Where they tend to falter:

1. Lack of emergent gameplay (circle jumping, bunny hopping, conc grenade jumping)

2. Curated experience (matchmaking) is inferior to community-led servers and maps

The magic of games from that period was due to both the game design and the nature of the Internet itself.

[a_e_k]

It's been a long time since I played a multiplayer shooter, but I used to have admin on a UT2k3 IG CTF clan server. One oddly strong memory I have from those days was banning cheaters and swapping lists of banned UUIDs with the admins of our peer clans. Nowadays I read about rampant cheating and banwaves, but I think there was something to be said for local decisions around banning and the immediacy of it. It certainly felt like a cozier community, at least.

[dylan604]

Not being a gamer, I'm not familiar with the level of cheating possibilities in modern games. I hear about it being done and the banwaves. What are players doing that is considered cheating?

[vehemenz]

Invisible walls and automatic aiming. It ruins the experience for anyone trying to get better at it. Especially now, with automatic matchmaking. You have to climb the ranks and beat the cheaters, whereas before you just had to know which servers had the good players in them.

[dylan604]

Okay, but how does a cheater use invisible walls and automatic aiming? Are they patching their local binary of the game to give them features other players do not have? I know playing against a cheater sucks, but I'm really curious on how the cheats occur. I'm guessing this is like anything else where one clever person figures it out first, and then the rest of the cheaters just use the trick without knowing anything about how/why it works. I guess I'm getting at the point that I might be impressed with the original discoverer, and they kind of have a HNer's mindset

[maccard]

> Are they patching their local binary of the game to give them features other players do not have?

Pretty much. It's often a little more sophisticated, (e.g. it's common to use dll injection and not actually modify the binary) but yes

[dividuum]

I'd like to add: 3. A huge (for the time) mod community. The amount of stupid mods I played in Quake 1/2 was amazing. So many original ideas that sometimes lead to the creation of completely new sub genres like action quake (a heavy influence for counter strike) or team fortress.

[raffraffraff]

I remember working at Compaq doing server support, clocking off at 5:30, and someone would fire up a Quaker 2 server. Roughly 20 people in the office would stay back to play for an hour. The mods were awesome. Someone had a Homer Simpson skin with about 10 different vocal samples for various damage. Best LAN sessions I ever had, I think.

I think the best commercial arena shooters were Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament 2004. Played the hell out of those at LAN parties.

For years I didn't game. I was never into solo play. However, about a year ago while working at a small start-up we decided to have a quick daily Deathmatch and settled on Xonotic (similar to Q3/UT2004) and I've actually been playing it a few times a week since. Absolutely love the fast pace arena stuff.

[vehemenz]

Funny, I think Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament were both better, respectively. Most likely an age thing. To be fair they were all pretty good.

[raffraffraff]

I remember getting Quake on CD, and playing it with the disc in the drive, so I got the atmospheric music/sounds produced by Trent Reznor. It was actually pretty scary playing that in the dark. I remember walk into a room. The music changes. The door slams shut behind me. Oh shit! A Shambler!

[rubicon33]

Totally agree. Half Life also had Tau/Gauss jumping. Movement dynamics by comparison nowadays are way more restricted, scripted, and generally "easier" but less rewarding. Nothing quite as thrilling as timing a perfect conc nade jump to launch yourself across the map deep into the teams flag room :)

[BoorishBears]

Funny you mention Overwatch because it has both

Mountains of emergent gameplay (if you play at a high enough level), and community led servers with custom game modes via the workshop.

But people still queue up for competitive because the very existence of a 24/7 accessible competitive system with instant post match feedback (read: not going to tournaments) is a huge draw for a lot of people, even if it's at the expense of the community aspect.

[thot_experiment]

Wrong. Don't get me wrong Overwatch is a well done game but there just isn't nearly the level of freedom and community you had with UT2k4 and Q3. The nature of the game itself is so so much more prescriptive. I played OW enough to get some faint shadow of 2000's era gaming (scrims, a regular team, loads of time to dedicate to it) but it's trash compared to the experience of hopping on a clan server.

[BoorishBears]

Overwatch has more mechanics than either of the games you mentioned, if you don't get that then you're not a good enough player to have discovered them, which is fine.

And you failed to comprehend my comment: the player base mostly doesn't want the community part over the immediate feedback of comp.

People don't want clan servers, they want to queue up, win or lose, then queue up again.

After all, nothing stops OW from supporting clans. Unlike say Warzone that needs 40 something people for a private match, OW will let your team play another team with no problem.

But people still overwhelmingly go it alone, because they want that immediate feedback loop of solo queue.

[thot_experiment]

Overwatch has more mechanics than Go, yet it is not a deeper game.