Quake is a first-person shooter game developed by id Software and published by GT Interactive. It was released in 1996 for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux, followed by Mac OS and Sega Saturn in 1997 and Nintendo 64 in 1998. The game’s plot revolves around monsters, items, weapons, and fragments of levels. Quake is the first game in the Quake series and uses the Quake engine.
After revolutionizing PC gaming with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, id Software introduced Quake, which mixed polygonal 3D graphics, networking, and grunge into a shooter-centric design. The Quake franchise is one of the most recognizable first-person shooter names in the industry, split between science fiction and dark fantasy settings. Quake titles are divided into science fiction and dark fantasy settings, with no narrative connection between them.
Id Software, the developer behind DOOM, Quake, and Wolfenstein, is credited with creating the first-person shooter genre. Quake also focused on online gaming and pioneered different game modes used in FPS games. The Quake franchise has a strong following, with development studio Nightdive Studio remastering classic shooters like Turok, Quake, and Blood.
The Quake franchise has been a significant part of the gaming industry, with its titles inspired by the groundbreaking, original dark fantasy first-person shooter genre.
📹 Why did Quake (and arena shooters) die?
The arena fps genre laid the ground work for shooters as a whole and created some of the best gaming experiences ever to be …
📹 What Killed an Entire Game Genre?
The Arena Shooter game genre dominated the scene for years and pushed online gaming into the mainstream, but these days …
It’s crazy to me how Quake 3 still looks like the fastest, craziest competitive FPS to watch after all this time. I loved playing Q3A back in the day but the skill ceiling definitely got out of control for me as someone who had a busy life. It was FUN when everybody was exploring the mechanics simultaneously. It stopped being fun when an unflinching meta had been discovered and it was honed razor sharp by players with the most time. But all competitive FPS games have that “problem” which is why I don’t play them anymore. Just too busy. But I’m grateful I got to be there when the genre was first really taking off 🙂
I feel bad that Unreal Tournament wasn’t mentioned I know epic games removed it from… Everywhere, but that game kinda tackled the issues Quake has with more team oriented gamemodes Blitz especially is a type of gamemode that’s very easy to understand and very hard to master, and because it’s a team oriented gamemode you’re not locked on specific options and instead have and execute plans as a team
Just 2 things to add:. getting rid of dedicated (community hosted) servers was a big part that made those games worse. Another problem with the extreme skill ceiling in those games was/is that those skills (once learned) can easily be transferred to another game. So while the first few games had a chance of building a community where everyone got better at the same or similar pace, every new release is SWARMED with quake-pros that obliterate everyone trying out a NEWLY released arena shooter. This leads to a big barrier for a community to break leading to mostly dead games, where the same pros battle it out, while everyone else moves on to find a safespace from those said pros.
From someone who still plays Quakeworld, this is a pretty solid article. One thing you missed though is what specifically makes movement so difficult in Quakeworld, and that’s friction. VQ3/QL and CPMA are much more forgiving due to the low friction, whereas in quake 1, jumps and routes have to be near perfect, since barely nudging a wall or stair brings you to a complete halt. This is a huge huge barrier to entry, even compared to VQ3/CPMA, since it punishes you so much for mistakes. If I could change one thing about Quake, I would change friction to be more similar to CPMA. I think any variation of Q3 is probably more accessible to new players for this reason. Q3 at least went in the right direction with less friction, making it “easier”, but I wouldn’t ever want it dumbed down any further than that. Like you said, the community would probably be against this change though. On the upside though, small communities in arena FPS games are generally pretty welcoming, so even if you’re really bad, we’ll still duel you.
A big factor that let CS take over is the cadence and rhythm to the game. There’s a distinct ebb and flow to each round and then to the series of rounds, letting you relax between high attention moments. This makes the game more sustainable to play mentally and makes the highs higher. When you play quake, you kind of have to be switched on all the time and it can be exhausting. There’s also the matter of compounding skills and the winner-take-all nature of quake. If I’m 20% better than my friend and we 1v1 in quake3, I will win 20 to -4. In counter-strike, even the best player in the world can be taken down by randomness or an unexpected move. Every dog can have his day. Where quake is more of a pure skill test which is not fun for people at the bottom.
The first problem is actually the true reason. Arena shooters have insane difficulty curve, so new players are going to get stomped, for a very long time. And because the primary game loop of arena shooters is “murder dudes until you’re the top dog”, if you’re just getting obliterated straight out of the gate, and this lasts for months until you “git gud”, it just feels like you’re not achieving anything. It straight up feels like a waste of time to play these games. They are targeted to competitive players, and they instantly make you feel uncompetitive by having a skill ceiling somewhere around Neptune. Feels bad. You might think Souls-likes have an insane skill ceiling too, and they are popular, so why not arena shooters? And the reason is in Souls-likes you play against NPCs. You grind hard enough, you’re going to learn their attack patterns, and eventually you just know that you will succeed, because humans are smarter than computers. You have a light at the end of the tunnel. With arena shooters it’s the opposite. The guys you play against are humans too, they learn and adapt just as much as you do, maybe even more so. So for any player who plays regularly, they tend to stay in their tier for a very long time. You just don’t feel like you’re progressing a lot of the time, because by the time you improve, other players have improved also, and any new players are scared away by the inevitable noob-stomping. That makes arena shooters very short lived, because once the top players emerge, everyone else just goes “I’ll never get to that level so why bother” and leave.
Former Reflex Arena dev here: “We will likely never see anything like this happen ever”. Well, I’ve got some ideas it seems you’d like but unfortunately another reason why AFPS games are dead is because game dev is expensive and they rarely make their money back, let alone enough for a sequel ;). But hey, if I ever win the lottery, I’d love to build one. Anyway, great article and agreed on all points.
Let me preface this with… I’m old. I started multiplayer gaming on DWANGO Doom and graduated to TCP/IP Quake then QuakeWorld, and continued playing arena FPS games through Quake Live before eventually filtering out– so I’ve seen arena FPS games at their absolute peak in terms of popularity and playerbase, down into the waning years. Arena shooters were destined to die, and only survived because they had a captive audience. At the height of AFPS popularity, they flourished because they were uniquely suited to their time. They ruled the roost when most people couldn’t stay on the Internet playing games all day, before broadband Internet was a normal thing people had. The kind of drop-in, zero-to-sixty instant action of deathmatch lent itself perfectly to time-limited Internet access. Things like “game balance” didn’t really matter when just the novelty of logging in and fragging out was mindblowing. But when people got broadband Internet access, and in general had more time to spend, game balance started to matter a lot more. And what your tactical, class-based, or loadout-based shooters brought to the table that AFPS games failed to implement were comeback mechanics and frequent gamestate resets. People are not going to put up with having to endure an entire match of getting absolutely railroaded by one person controlling a whole map/lobby with no recourse unless they absolutely have to. Counter-Strike may be slower (and more boring), but you’re always a save round away from having an M4 and being on equal footing with everyone else in the lobby.
The immediate high, followed immediately by the backlash for HL2DM was rough… While it’s true that some forms of prop boosting got nerfed, it was mostly the most broken, so the competitive scene is still quite insane. As a result though, a good chunk of the player based only plays on “hi-kill” servers as they don’t stand a chance on more stock settings. Given mechanical differences between servers, many form their own communities and function on “game nights” rather than being continually active, so knowing when to sign in depending on what style you want to play is key.
Back when Gianni Mattagrano started his fraggy friday streams was the most fun I’d ever had in QC. Wanna know why? It brought in thousands on players new to the game. I’d never seen so many Rangers and Sorlags populate the arenas in my life. It was interesting too perusal everyone learn the game at once as opposed to what Quake Live’s become with only the elite still playing.
It feels a bit sad to know that I only really got into Arena Shooters properly after playing Unreal following it’s removal from legal storefronts and long after the genre fizzled out. Whilst I did sporadically play Quake Live before, I never realized just how much I was missing out in past years until that point. Still, it feels nice to know that I can still catch a glimpse of what once was with the few dedicated players that still remain.
Another thing that fighting games are doing, as of more recently, that I think arena FPS could be doing, is that they’re providing more casual content, without lowering the skill ceiling. They’re offering more character customization, tutorials, campaigns, ranking systems with progression/playtime rewards. I think the most important thing is the recent focus on a more robust story mode in fighting games. Something where the casual player can learn mechanics, while not feeling like they’re just running drills. For progressive rewards players could earn armor like halo 3 (even though most players use forced models in arena FPS), they could earn icons and player tags aswell. Fighting games and Arena FPS are some of my most recent, but favorite genres. And seeing fighting games try to reach a more casual audience lately, does give me hope for Arena FPS in the future. Doom 2016, Eternal, and the recent onslaught of PVE focused indie boomer shooters is also promising. I think if Doom 2016 hadn’t watered down their multiplayer so much, they would have had something pretty special on their hands. So here’s hopin’. Great article, homie.
Nice article, thanks. However, you had only covered the “arena” part of these games – TDM, Clan Arena, etc. Maybe yes, these are only playable using few fixed tactics like you mentioned. CTF is another thing. CTF is an art. I mean, I will subscribe and wait you make a article about CTF. CTF is THE e-sport, which has not been explored yet as an e-sport. Everybody only talks about TDM or Bomb Mode nowadays. (I really love CTF.)
I got Quake 3 for Christmas back in 01 and it eventually became a game I would plan tons of in high school. But I enjoyed the mods more than the default arena mode. Mods like FreezeDT (not the inferior uFreeze), RA3, Excessive, and Jailbreak. It added variety. Also killing servers for “match making” prevented people from forming friendships and clans, which is another way to improve. Through the social aspect. Modern day games really don’t encourage it in the same way.
I think another very major factor in death of arena shooters you forgot to mention is that for about 10 years every single shooter that was released was always arena shooter, people got tired of quake formula being repeated over and over and over again, so when counter-strike and later on cod came out people flocked to it like crazy because its smth new, we can see a similar effect happening right now with “hard core” shooters like hunt showdown and escape from tarkov, people are flocking to it just because its smth new in a stale fps “market”
I loved Q3A so much when I was younger. You’re spot on with AFPS games of that variety having vets that just rock the shit out of anyone getting used to the game for the first time. Maybe one day we’ll see a revival in the multiplayer sense. Great article dude, world needs more skeletons making articles.
There’s really one simple thing that killed the arena shooter: They’re too niche for the big publishers to care about. In the late 2000s, every big developer that made games like Quake or Unreal Tournament was growing MASSIVE. Their budgets and dev teams were ballooning to ridiculous sizes. Because of that, they needed to increase their income as well. So niche, high skill genres like FPS and RTS got dumbed down a lot in an attempt to bring in the much bigger casual and console audiences. And when that still failed to bring in more players, they simply stopped making them all together. I’m glad that the indie scene has kept more niche games like that alive at least a little bit. But I would also love to see them reappear in the mainstream “AAA” level again. Games like Doom Eternal show there is an audience for it, even if it won’t bring them Fortnite levels of profits. I also wish Epic would die in a fire for de-listing every Unreal game from every digital store.
Another recommendation is warfork. It’s free, and is basically quake, but you have both forms of bhopping, and you can turn your momentum into a dash when you hit the floor, allowing you to change directions easily and wall-jump. It’s a bit more on the dead side, but I hope with this comment I can make it a little less dead.
I disagree that Halo doesn’t have a lot of movement tech. It has a lot of movement tech. Generally the slower a game is forces a player to use the sandbox to move around quickly. I’m not talking about vehicles either. The small amount of crouch sliding, nade jumping, button combos, jumping off of other precise objects you interact with in the map, jumping off of your equipment as you throw it. There is so much tech in the game. Also slower movement means you really have to make the right choice in any situation because making a bad choice in movement creates a bigger punishment because you need to use tech to escape rather than quickly escaping in faster movement games. I’m also not saying that it has more or less skill because faster movement arena shooters have their trade off as well. Slower movement also means that there is more teamwork that is needed in order to control a map making it more about the collective team focused skill rather than an individual skill.
Another small issue about Arena FPS games, based on my personal experience, is the frustration for new players due to the saturation of pro players (mostly player that have an insane amount of hours and experience). Not supportive at all and this discourage the new comers, unless you have steel motivation. This indirectly influencer the arrive of new players
Because no one wants to try to compete with the guy in every single match that. Has already been playing it for 12 hours that day. Already spent years learning the movement. Knows the fastest path to every single power weapon. And is unkillable because they’re camping the power weapon with the power weapon. These games are fun, they really are but saying it’s not obvious what killed this genre is ignorant.
I know the feel of the difficulty part. Growing up playing quake I was fairly good at it, but none of my friends would join me in playing because they thought the game was too difficult and went right back to call of duty. We did have a small compromise when doom 2016’s multiplayer came out (which I still think is underrated and found very fun) as well as Titanfall, but none of them stuck around once the new call of duty came around. Now I get called the quake boomer of the group hahah
Tactical/milsim shooters (COD, Battlefield) killed the Arena genre IMO. Doesn’t help that the devs themselves didn’t really do much to market or improve their products. I still play a lot of UT2004 and it’s almost mind blowing how advanced it is for the early 2000s. Such a shame Epic killed the franchise that gave them their success.
In my opinion, the things that the majority of gamers see as “problems” with Quake and arena FPS games are actually the things that make them so enjoyable for me. I am someone that didn’t start playing FPS games on MnK/PC until the end of 2021, after a decade of playing console FPS games. Learning how to aim with a mouse was a huge barrier to entry, as well as all the other movement tech associated with many games. But this is what I found so attractive about Quake. I loved that I couldn’t just hop on and start winning without much effort. I liked that I could tell there was so much depth to the game that I just hadn’t discovered yet. I liked how mechanically demanding it was and it made me want to spend the time learning the mechanics and mastering them. I started aim training and spending time in custom matches working on my movement. And now I just can’t go back to games like COD. It just feels unfulfilling and uninteresting. Quake is like a blank canvas for FPS players. It may seem simple and restricted to people who are used to having a million weapon attachments and 100 weapons they can choose from, but it’s what can be done within the limits of the game that makes it feel so special. You don’t get better weapons as you play, you don’t get better perks the more hours you spend; you just get better at the game. Everyone is on the same playing field and the outcome of a match depends entirely on the skill level of the players. But most people I know just don’t care about this.
Incidentally, your comparison to fighting games is accurate. The communities for both genres (fighting games and arena shooters) tend to be very insular and stagnant. Due to the cost involved in “gitting gud”, players end up feeling invested in whatever the current implementation is, and so resistant to structural change. After all, a genuinely new take on the genre would require learning from scratch and effectively invalidate the original investment. It’s essentially a case of “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven”. What motivation does a very good player have to jump ship to a new game where they’ll be a complete newbie and probably get rolled by its own established player base? Consequently, change can only be accepted if it’s gradual enough to retain the existing hierarchy of skill. Arena shooters died out because developers made better shooters. That’s really the long and short of it. Fighting games have managed to limp along as a relic of the past simply because nobody’s really managed to make a better fighting game that doesn’t just copy one of the few available templates. Street Fighter 6 is the closest we’ve seen, and even that’s receiving backlash for “dumbing down the genre”.
One other thing to remember is for the longest time a game had multiplayer modes and no matter how good it was, the next game would come out and people moved on. 99% of games with deathmatch modes are dead. Especially EA games having their servers shut down. Giving the community power to host things, to mode things helps. Also having a strong single player experience is good for those who don’t want to be stomped by a pro
21:52 I think this mentality developed as a reaction to the “devs trying to kill their own game” section you had in the article where the times they’ve neutered complex mechanics has soured them to the entire idea of “change” and time has only solidified that opinion. It’s good to be cautious before messing with something that has seemingly worked fine for so long but if the genre is in the gutter as it stands today then perhaps it’s time to start experimenting so things get better, even if it puts them out of their comfort zones.
Interesting, I have always had basically the opposite conclusion you seem to make here. It’s not the presence (or developer attempt to stifle) mechanical skill gap that killed games like Quake and Unreal. It’s the fact you needed map knowledge to compete on even the most basic level. People can learn to aim, they enjoy learning mechanics; but when you have to do your homework and study routes through a level to even stand a chance? Nobody likes that. (Other than people who already know it.) This is why the CoD and Battlefield type game took over- Reactions and mechanical skill are more important than pre-game knowledge about item placements etc. To most people, that feels much more “fair”. People hated on Doom 2016’s multiplayer but I think it was a fair attempt at a balance between the two approaches. It’s a shame they didn’t bring it back and refine it for Eternal, because it had potential to be great.
Q3 is definitly snow-bally but if you ever watched FPS e-sports Q3 creates some of the most exciting games. Because of the snow-ball effect of map control there are big turn arounds where one team can recover even from way way behind. It also has a hunter/ hunted dynamic since one team usually has an advantage in items which leads to dynamic aggressive and defensive play instead of artificial “objectives” like in CS. Problem is you need 2 equally good players for this game to be fun.
Very good content. One thing I’d add (and that I got from the venerable John Carmack when I worked at FB), the improvements in physics engine cause many of the good old mechanics that exist in Quake to look and feel very bad. More recently, this has been worked around in titles like Doom 2016 by adding double jump and ledge grabbing, but this require the genra to reinvent itself to some extent.
this is a good article, I also want to note and state. As a person who does work on games for a living. There is always an expectation and thought that certain game genres etc may boom or return later in the years as a choice, trend or even as competitive sports. Arena shooters and fighting games had one thing in common back in the day, it let us meet people irl and make more friends eventually building a community. With how newer games has locked us to stay at home and play online with no actual physical connection, a lot of people I know and spoken to do say they don’t like gaming like this anymore and wish to go out and meet people again. Games like these do shine due to this. Only trouble is, don’t make this as a nostalgia factor. A good game will be that which not only brings back older folks but also introduces itself to younger people. In turn making it a larger community. Of course it doesn’t have to be a perfect game as long as it is fun.
As a ‘new’ quake pro player, more people should try Quake Champions compared to the older quake games this one is really well balance and easier to play, has an active player base (the biggest in AFPS), competitive scene/pro league every Saturday/Friday on twitch, new updates with content every season, ranking system with matchmaking and at the same time casual players who just want to chill and not go super hardcore, also the best part about it: a really nice community of people 😀 Just lacks more marketing because seems like no one heard about this game or that they have the old memory of the failed launch.
Hey, first article I ever saw from your website and I loved it, it resonated a lot with me. Guess we both are drawn to those games where there is a skill gap and you’re not just shooting things brain dead. I played my fair share of fighting games and yes, the skill gap there is hard on new players, with with SF6 it seems to be way better. I wanted to get better at Quake Champions, love perusal it being played on high level, but man, I AM being noobstomped and it seems I can’t find anyone who is a noob as me to practice without being super frustated, or without it feeling like I’m going to the gym and praying to find someone there to instruct me.
I think saying the Arena FPS is “dead” is an unfair categorization. Saying it is not growing or niche is very fair. I agree with your reasons for the genre’s downfall, yet the Quake 1 and Quake 2 remastered communities have thousands of members in their discords, with people playing games from PC, Switch, Xbox, and PS. There are people modding these games, making maps for these games and playing these games by the hundreds. Now is it hundreds of thousands? Not really. Diabotical has 250k people playing the beta, but that game failed drastically. There are also non-Steam open source games like Xonotic who still get 500+ unique players daily. Some of these communities have enough to keep them going and it all depends on what your definition of “dead” is. For me, if I get in a sever at any point in the day, that is alive to me… Most of these games I play are alive. I will say I think the barrier to entry is very challenging to today’s gamer and the developers don’t do enough to close that gap. However, I do think the interest is there and I would not be surprised if “someone” does it right and the AFPS comes back. But I have no idea what that secret formula will ever be. It was a good article and I enjoyed it. I just think that it is a bit in bad taste to call the AFPS “dead” when if you step into the right communities, you will find they are not online alive, but thriving. It just depends on who you talk to and the circles you run in I guess…
Awesome article!! Like you I’m a younger Arena Shooter fan While everyone was playing halo and COD I was on Quake 🔥🔥 There’s nothing like them. Still the pinnacle of FPS games. M&K support for consoles would be sick. Hope the rumored Quake reboot is true 🔥🔥 Id Software struck gold with Doom 2016 and Eternal. Now if only the Legendary Quake can return to its former glory.
I MISS DIABOTICAL!!! It had so much style, aesthetic customization, and community support! It was a fresh face for the tiny AFPS scene and it attracted a lot of new blood, including me. I remember competing in community tournaments and met some really cool people through 1v1s and streams. The custom maps were some of the most beautiful ive ever played in a game with a map builder; it really spoke volumes for how passionate that player base was. I was so sad to hear the creator stopped support some years ago, and now it’s lost to time :,( Is anyone still playing it?
To be honest it seems to me that shooters have been moving to slower cover based “realism” from the very start. Every ID software “hitscan” enemy is an early example, and games like COD and CS are when it really came into fruition. I do think arena shooters could make a comeback, especially considering how obsessively modern gamers will grind to “git gud”.
Not to be that one guy but Infinite and Halo 2/3 definitely have movement tech, but they’re so niche you’re rarely going to encounter it in general gameplay. Good article otherwise, another recommendation is Unreal Tournament 99, it’s technically abandonware now and it still has a decent community behind it.
Found one more that would be nice to try out. Warfork! Basically quake live but they added wall jumps, that you can either use to reset your downwards momentum for wall jumping, or you can use it to make a complete 180 turn without losing and momentum. It is entirely tied to the long jump cooldown tho.
Quake Champions did an amazing job of killing the arena shooter genre by itself. When Quake Live was released, which is Quake 3, but rereleased, they added a bunch of different things, gamemodes and stuff. The main draws of Quake Live was the Clan Arena and the duel ranking system. Both which were NOT in Quake Champions on release. It took Bethesda/ID Software almost a full year to implement 1v1 timelimit ranked, which was THE matchformat for every duel quake E-sports event. I get that they wanted to highlight their new character loadout system, but Quake was solidified as an E-sports game. By removing the E-sports aspect in favor of some bullshit roundbased respawn system, they effectively killed the E-sports aspect, and by the time the 1v1 TL ranked was released, everyone stopped playing, because there were no incentive to continue playing. So most people went back to Quake Live, until they decided to end all support for Quake Live because they wanted to make everyone switch back to Quake Champions… Which nobody did. Why they didn’t implement FreezeTag or Clan Arena, the other two most popular gamemodes, for Quake Champions, is a fucking riddle. If they did that, and added a map editor to the damn game and made it so we could make Defrag-style maps/servers in QC, the game would be played like never before. Don’t fix what’s not broken.
L-Cancel can be performed with the shoulder buttons, but also Z. Using a digital L or R press initiates the 40 frame tech-lockout period. Therefore, spamming instead of trying to time your presses carries the disadvantage of being unable to tech when hit. This opens counterplay where the opponent can change your L-cancel timing by positioning, or changing the size of, their shield. When you force a failed L-Cancel you open the opponent to shield grabbing or other punishes. You can look at slippi replays of top players like Zain and you’ll see they miss more or less 10-20% of their L-Cancels because of the opponent’s interference with their timing. Sakurai knew what he was doing.
The journey of fighting games and AFPS compared is night and day and might be worth a look at, especially given how successful fighting game are, and they are since big studios keep making them, even hiring writers for their shitty stories. AFPS need to evolve to fit modern times, they don’t even have to be on console to be successful, the just need to meet the expectations of modern gamers and this won’t necessarily ruin the spirit of the genre. Modern gamers don’t care about skill gaps, forum whiners and COD fluencers do. If you don’t believe that, remember Fortnite and how much people complained about building and how every argument from the forum whiner about it was the exact same as when people would complain about Bhopping, or edge dashing? Yet these zoomers got really good at building which is a very difficult thing to do. Of the modern shooters on the market, Fortnite is the most mechanically demanding, so mechanically demanding though that they actually threw these people a bone and just removed it and yet building still enjoys higher player counts. Gamers don’t care about skill gaps if they’re having fun.
The dumbing down of game design is inevitable. Even in Quake one of the most popular modes was Rocket Arena/Clan Arena that gave players full weapon loadouts, max armor and removed the need for map knowledge. The idea that new gamers can’t handle hard games isn’t entirely true or untrue. The most important thing is it has to be easy to pick up and play before they need to start mastering high level skills. When arena shooters started out it was probably much easier to get into as there were lots of people playing and most of them were bad. But as time went on casuals would leave and the hardcore that stayed would smash any newbies that tried the game. Fortnite is a massively popular game that is easy to pickup and play, but is also insanely difficult at higher skill levels, yet we have young kids mastering these skills
Prefacing this by saying great article, really liked how you structured everything and it was already a topic I’m interested in so I’m glad YouTube recommended me this. I’m a big boomer shooter fan, but also not nearly a fraction as experienced as anybody who lives and breathes arena multiplayer. I think the best thing that could happen to the genre would be if Quake or Unreal got a DOOM 2016 style reboot and had its multiplayer revamped as a result. I think that the biggest issue with all arena shooters is that the playerbases are absolute gods and will curbstomp any newcomer because they don’t know tech or have map awareness, leading to people simply leaving because they’re not having fun. With how popular the new DOOMs are, I’m sure if a Quake reboot came out, a ton of new people would try the game out, allowing for a nicer experience for the casual audience since they actually have people at their skill level to play with. Epic could also make a killing off Unreal with their Fortnite playerbase, but that would mean they would finally acknowledge that Fortnite isn’t their only franchise. To prevent metagaming, there could be loadouts/characters like in TF2 or Quake Champions, but spawns could also be randomized. It would be less about b-lining to certain spots and more like using your movement to navigate the map and figure out where’s the best spot to get an advantage on the spot. In general, I think that randomness could be a very important way to bringing the genre back since it makes every round unique, and it’s the reason why people enjoy rougelikes so much.
I still play Quake Champions in 2023, and the reason why they die – there is no interest in development new Arena FPS games. If you don’t make new games – people will eventually stop playing your game. And reality is – there is no quality product on the market. Quake Champion is pure garbage, game is not working on any AMD GPU and have unreasonable large list of technical problem that is just unsolved. Diabotical – made every possible move to fail miserably, like EPIC game store release and acting like a bunch of lunatics and beggars on community page. By making Arena FPS you not only shouldn’t fail like an idiot, but also create a quality product. And i have very good example of HUNT: Showdown, game is a lot more niche product compared to ArenaFPS games, but have a very good community around it and a steady grow over years. Because this game is about quality and consistency and it display a great respect and reputation from developers behind it.
Games like Quake and Halo with map based equipment and power item spawns were always going to fade away in the strive for balance between players. Players having encyclopedic knowledge of a map and its pickups and the ability to effectively use them against someone else has never been conductive for new player retention. Basically, arena shooters killed themselves through their requirements to sometimes even begin to succeed
My short story about multiplayer games: I have always been a single-player gamer, but back in my school days, my friend decided to introduce me to multiplayer games. He was a Quake III enthusiast, so we started playing Quake together. It was an impossible task for me. Although I understood everything he taught me about reading maps, calculating item respawn times, and predicting enemy movements based on their status, it was too challenging for my slower thinking process. Then, I decided to try Counter-Strike on my own, but it was also a major failure. Every time I died, I had to wait for the match to restart, and since I died numerous times, it felt like I was spending more time waiting than actually playing. The final game I tried was Unreal Tournament, and it was slightly better because the maps were bigger. This gave me, as a slow thinker, some chances to hide and surprise attack enemies when they least expected it. However, despite these attempts, the simple truth was that I didn’t enjoy online games. I completely skipped this part until PUBG was released. It turned out to be a real game-changer for me! It was slow-paced and felt more like a stealth game, which I’m a fan of in the single-player world. With PUBG, I got a second chance at online games, and I also tried the Battlefield series (1 to V) and liked them too. I won’t say i’m good at playing PUBG and Battlefield, but at least i could spent a rare evening in them without a feeling that i was raped.
Player choice? Yeah, right… most “players” go for meta anyway, so, there’s not much choice in cod/ow/r6 and whatnot. Or rather it exists, but any choice of “out of meta” weapons/heroes potentially puts player at huge disadvantage. Plus other people’s choices can actively limit yours (well, ow is prime example of that with hard-counter mechanic). I agree with 2 other arguments tho. Anyway, very good article, keep it up.
As for the reason of the genre’s death, the issue is not even the skill or the learning curve, because gamers, nowadays, still play skillful and complex competitive games. For example, real-time strategy games are still around, and they’re anything but dead, and personally, I think they’re even harder than arena shooters. Simulative racing games are a thing. Faithful tactical shooters are also competitive, requiring much more thinking and ability to cooperate than your average FPS. As you can see, they have nothing to do with skins. And to further prove their futility, watch the steam charts of CS 1.6 or CS Source. The problems with arena shooters are completely different: the ancient and cheesy 90s aesthetics that modern gamers might not feel attracted to; the fact that the system is antiquated, because players don’t have anything to win for. In a match, If it’s a loss or a win, it won’t change much, except that the winners might have a personal satisfaction. Even when you start winning every match, you’re not going to realistically gain anything. There aren’t standings, and there aren’t tournaments to aspire for, unlike how it was in the past, where there were even local LAN tourneys. If there is such a steep learning curve, with multiple experienced day 0 players demolishing you, why would a new player, in 2024, want to learn to play this game? Thus, there won’t be new players even on NEWLY RELEASED arena shooters, cause there would still be skilled players, regardless of the recency of the game, cause they had already played the old arena shooters.
I think that the Arena Shooter also died because of the high level of abstraction and anti-immersion shenanigans of higher level competitive players. We’re talking about things like fluorescent character skins, forced flat lighting (for better visibility), forced low res textures, forced simplified particles and explosions, most animations disabled (like shaking and head bobbing), and more After a while, most average gamers (not even talking about “casuals” here, but normal gamers that actually do play a variety of games to a competent and knowledgeable level) would look at Arena Shooter footage and would just be put off by it. Sure, rocket jumping can be fun, but what does that even matter (or mean) when you look at the screen and the artistic direction of the OG game is all gone, and Quake now resembles some sort of flat 3-dimmensional pong where 2 fluorescent humanoids move around in a geometrical brown scenario, hurling unidentifiable projectiles at one another? I know many gamers (not casuals) that were massively put off by what the community turned Q3 into, and just moved on into more visually pleasing things
I personally think the push in the 10’s towards ‘advanced movement’ played a big part in killing off arena shooters. They began feeling fundamentally different to play for long-time fans, while also alienating new fans by widening the skill difference between top players and new ones. You could do some level of advanced movement in quake too due to engine oddities, but it wasn’t nearly as big a focus outside of higher skill levels Also, there was a kind of charm to it when it was unintended? I don’t really know how to explain that feeling.
I went through a phase where I played a lot of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena in my teens (1999 to about 2002), but by ~2003, it was obvious that tactical FPS had taken over the shooter genre. In my case: It’s because I just always enjoyed playing out scenarios that were closer to real-world battles than sci-fi battles, and the GWOT put that type of combat on the news regularly, so my teen self wanted to get in on the action virtually. It just seemed like they were the right type of shooter for the times.
Thanks for this article as someone who is their mid 50,s, I really appreciate that the younger generation is really getting into arena type shooters . My favorite triple A multiplayer that was released on consoles in the last 15 years was DOOM 2016 . Although to me DOOM ETERNAL is one of my favorite single player campaign of all time . I think if DOOM Eternal had a awesome multiplayer like DOOM 2016 it would have increased the amount of people playing Arena shooters today . Hopefully if they released,Quake Champions on current consoles it w ll get more people in FPS Arena shooters. Again thanks for this article.
“People just wanna have fun and enjoy the games they’re playing” It’s very simple. You can have fun if you grasp the concept. Then I will intruduce rocket jumps to you as a newbie and you will not have fun. Then you will adapt and then maybe you will have fun. The idea of going into a grand strategy game like EUIV or HOIIV and just having fun without knowing anything is absurd. Every game has a skill ceiling. And if you’re asked to play CS or Quake just know that it has a high skill ceiling and that it is maybe one of the few games those old fucks can still beat you. I can’t get a shot in on CS:GO etc but CS 1.6 I’m rolling headshots all day
Nobody wants to spend countless hours mastering their skills in a articlegame just so they can play dead arena shooters that are purposefully designed to be permanently stagnated because the neckbeards who still care about the genre will throw a hissy fit if anything aside from shit they’ve known for decades is changed, or if anything new is introduced.
a genre that refused to change much less evolve is doomed to fail the moment a better alternative shows up there are numerous things that could have been made to mitigate the skill gap, like item randomization, respawn time randomness among other things. puritans reject any and all changes to the formula and this is what you get. arena shooters aren’t coming back until it becomes more welcoming to new players and let me tell you, i’m a boomer, i grew up playing doom, quake 3, counter strike, etc. i tried qc once and i just felt bored cause it was the same resource management denial that high level 1v1 games devolved into. first order of the business is to do away with 1v1s and make it 8 ffa or something like that. you want to spend 10 mins spawn camping? that’s fine, you can just do that in qc or whatever, but not in any modern take to the arena shooter genre. those kinda players and that kinda mentality has to go before this genre ever has the slightest chance again going mainstream
I remember skipping class the day that Quake: Champions dropped on PC when I was in college my freshman year. I was INCREDIBLY hyped for this game, as my very first game EVER was Quake 3: Arena. My uncle had a pirated copy of it, and he let me have so long as I didn’t tell my father (I was 6, this was like 2004). My older siblings convinced me that setting the mode to Nightmare made it easier for me because “The computers will think you’re a nightmare to them!”…so I was unintentionally playing Quake on the hardest difficulty since I was 6. Quake: Champions was such a letdown for me. The lightning gun was broken on release, the hero shooter was oversaturated at the time, so everyone was upset with some champions just being better than others outright which led to no reason to pick up others. No one knew how to play the map or fight for resources. The lobbies were filled half with Quake veterans that had 15+ years of experience, and new players who thought that this was just another Overwatch/TF2 clone. The game assumed everyone had no experience in Quake so a pro player creating an account for the first time could be matched up against little Timmy sneaking on and trying to play just to have some fun. There was no ranked at the time which made it harder to separate the Pros from the Noobs. It made for some extremely lopsided matches, where team deathmatches had 2 players having 90% KP, and the others just being fodder for those two. The maps weren’t interesting enough to hold my attention to learn them and no one played the “Quake” way on the maps anyway, it was just a f**kfest of everyone running around shooting the machine gun not even picking up weapons.
Arena shooters may have been “harder” but they required significantly less skill. The power ups give you an objective advantage over everyone else. I played Quake 3, Arena, and Unreal Tournament for over a decade. It was not a contest between shooters. It was a race of who can get to a specific point on the map first. In most modern shooters like Counter Strike, the better shot will win. Related to this; I thought it was funny how you called Quake 3 “aim centric” while showing footage of people using laser beams and rocket launchers. How was that not intended to be a joke?
Nice vid. Warsow/Warfork deserves a shot as well. Then one can get into more obscure stuff like Assault Cube and the Cube games. I always think Half Life (first one) was underrated as an arena shooter, especially when adrenaline gamer exists. It did a lot right by having movement mechanics to be very accessible, yet skill-demanding and powerful in terms of map control.
honestly i think a big factor is the obsession with airstrafing. like, so many modern arena shooters try to move like quake to be as fast as quake, completely disregarding the fact that quake’s movement kinda. blows like it’s very skillful and makes for very spectacular spectating when you’re perusal high-level players navigate maps, that’s undeniable, but it’s just kinda nonsense dependent on unintuitive engine jank. like, okay, rocket jumping is a beautifully intuitive yet complex maneuver that makes sense in anything where someone can survive their own rocket explosion. bunnyhopping is a bit of a article game physics thing, but it’s easy to understand and put into practice when you learn that there’s no air drag and there’s a quirk where you can jump again before friction can take effect. so that’s all well and good. but bunnyhopping is of limited use without a way to build up the speed to maintain, and while rocket jumping is a powerful option for that, it’s committal and resource- and location-dependent and only something you can really use when you find yourself in the golden opportunity for a sick outplay. so there needs to be a bread ‘n butter tech that builds up speed for the movement to have that signature richness, and a lot of games decide to make it … removing your finger from your go forward button, doing a weird little wiggle in the air, and strafing against your wiggle. while maintaining your bunnyhop, because so much as a frame of friction can obliterate your newly obtained speed and sure, advanced movement tech in most games ends up just being weird engine jank like that, but like.
I think the biggest problem hands down is the skill floor for new players. I played arena shooters all my life and even I give up everytime I try the multiplayer because it’s just not fun getting curbstomped right from th start. Every good game has a dificulty progression where it teaches you the skills and mechanics so you don’t feel completely lost and helpless. And single player campaign is not a solution because it plays nothing like the multiplayer. Same thing with real time strategies and it’s the same reason why they are mostly dead or dominated by Koreans. I never played COD and any modern shooters but I am aware thath those games have matchmaking systems that would pit you against people of similar skill – something like this would help – would be a much better experience to learn the game playing against other noobs. A handicap system would also be nice – a game mode where you get stronger and more tanky with every death so you can still enjoy the game even when playing against better players. As for the native support for mouse and keyboard – I’m a PC player and even I think that plugging those into the console kinda defeats the purpose. When I plug my laptop to the TV I want to enjoy being able to comfortably play using the controller. I think a better idea would be to develop a game speciffically designed to be played with a controller in a way where using mouse and keyboard would provide no advantage whatsoever.
I don’t quite get the idea that arena shooter are more aim centric followed by an explanation of how weapon selection and situational advantage dictate who’s on top… so nothing to do with aim? I get that not exactly the same aiming skill is required for slower paced tac shooter, but they’re still pretty aim-centric, CS is even highly aim centric. Also I don’t exactly see the cycling of spawning resources on map as “resource management”. You make the distinction by calling it “on map resource management”, but I don’t think this name convey the right idea. In arena shooters the real depth of gameplay is in vying for control and collection of resources and not in the proper management of them, which never goes beyond “watch out for their level”. In tac shooter the reverse is true : depth of gameplay is in the management of the economy outside of the round and not really into resource collection in round (getting eco frag with a high reward weapon or picking up dropped better weapon and utility at the end of the round). Finally an example of a game where both are essential to the gameplay would be RTS like Starcraft : you must fight for the map’s resources, but also decide on how you allocate them during (build order, macro, etc.).
quake is still alive, what really died is Unreal Tournament, and thats proof that people dont know whats good anymore. Yeah, quake was fun back in the days, but UT really rocked with awesome gameplay, mods, and just massive content. UT3 was the best shooter ever, but people died too much and couldnt understand why their aiming skills wont let them win all the time. UT3 was more than just precise aiming, it was taktical, it was tricky, it was about learning something new everyday, there were a thousand really good maps! but people always played 2 of them, because they did not want any good maps, they dont want to learn anything, they wanted just to make headshots, and thats why we are here today, still playing counterstrike, with nothing new at all for 20 years now. just kill kill kill. no fun, no style, no coolness..
All these people complaining about ´´ Game to hard for people ´´ are also a reason why games die, because instead of thinking how people can learn in a games they go to the easiest solution and blame people instead of better ways of teaching people on how to play and having them learn against people who are as good as them, because most people don´t think it is fun getting destroyed by a no lifer who has +1000 hours in the game.
Another reason why I think they’re dying: Esports… Yes Quakecon was the birth of Esports as we know them, but before sponsorships, massive events on stadiums, and teams becoming celebrities, it was just tournaments organized to gather people who devoted themselves to a game and wanted to show off their skills, we went from John Carmack giving his Ferrari to the winner of the first Quakecon tournament to: look at these tryhards sponsored by this brand, all wearing the same ugly jacket and most of them korean, playing a game that isn’t even mechanically complex for a million dollar prize that you the audience helped to gather, oh and there’s also a high chance one of them is using cheats… We went from just have fun to I want to be famous, and that’s just sad…
I don’t think arena fps games being unpopular has much to do with skill. TF2 is an arena fps with a very wide skill gap between low level and high level play, yet it’s still pretty popular with a large casual audience. Also, fighting games have a large skill gap between players, but they seem to be doing just fine. I don’t know what the reason is for arena fps’s being unpopular, but I doubt it’s skill. (also I don’t get what you have against cod)
I missed it man. I got my PC 3 years ago and I have wanted one since I was a kid and saw youtube articles of Counter Strike, Quake, and Unreal. Little did I know that the Golden Age had already passed. It makes me sad, these are the types of games I adore and they’re just so dead now. There’s still servers and players but it’s not like it used to be. Casual FPS gaming is essentially non-existent in the modern era of gaming. Don’t get me wrong, Extraction Shooters and Battle Royale games are super fun but they’re just not as fast paced and chaotic as something like Quake or Unreal or Tribes. Also, I just miss chunky polygons, bright warm color pallets, and kickass punchy weapons. It’s refreshing to see all these new boomer shooters and arena style FPS games coming out but most of them just don’t even have multiplayer PVP components at all. Something like Ultrakill or Turbo Overkill could really benifit from a multiplayer matchmaking system. Although, I suppose Duskworld didn’t really do too well in the long run. It was nice that they included it at all to begin with anyway. I know I’m just one guy, and I know I’m a little stuck in the past, but man. It just hurts to see giants like Unreal and Quake get left in the dust for shitty microtransaction filled sweatfests like Fortnite, Gears 5, Halo Infinite and whatever other garbage they’re peddling nowadays.
The reason is stated in the first minute of the article. Arena FPS is hard. And they don’t hold your hand. You CAN’T win by just standing still. It requires thinking. It requires good mechanics. Essentially improving at arena fps is about incrementally improving everything slowly, and most people hate that grind
High level CoD still has a large skillgap, even with SBMM I SMOKE public match lobbies (I’m Crimson/Iridescent in ranked), even when I play ranked matches in gold or platinum its like playing against preschoolers a lot of the time. At the highest level the game is very competitive and the skill gap from average to very good to mastery is big. Not to say that cod is a better competitive game than something like CS or anything its not, but it does have a large skillgap and the best players will toss up 95% of the playerbase without breaking a sweat.
Modern, multiplayer FPS feel like work. I already have a full-time job. I don’t want to practice at a game for hours on end in order to be able to compete with sweats. I don’t even want to compete, period. I want to have fun. Halo Infinite could have been the answer, but they ruined the game by catering to pro gamers and whales. They made tweaks to guns, and focused more on adding content to the shop than adding new game modes and maps. And they think that delivering a battle royale is going to bring people back? Streamers already have plenty of BRs to play.
in my experience it’s because the majority of fps gamers nowadays are using gamepads in games with hardcoded aim asssist. the skill ceiling is so high in arena shooters that people trying to get into them need to be very interested in actively improving rather than just playing for fun, and your average 35 year old with a kid would rather delete someone with the r-99 than practice rails.
Honestly skill gaps in general piss me off as I have something wrong with my brain that makes it so I am a jack of all trades but I can’t get good at anything Meaning people that practice a game the same amount as me or less usually out perform me fast Honestly I just don’t really play competitive games now, unless someone I know gets me involved
The bigger reason they died is that the skill gap for new players and others are so big that they get owned so bad that they never come back. This is sad as they just quit before they can get good at them, and this is coming from someone that has been playing for 20+ years. But many times the players will help the noobs. But will still slaughter them. Thank you for the article it was nice. 🙂
Xonotic is great. I haven’t played Quake in quite a while but Xonotic was a lot better than I expected from an open source game. More related to the article, I remember both quake (+ unreal tournament to a lesser extent) and counter strike being played at LANs, along with the original dota. What’s interesting is how CS and dota survived when lans became less prevalent and quake didn’t. There wasn’t a need for things like matchmaking because you’d be playing with people you knew, who were in the room with you. If everybody knew who the quake god in the friend’s group was, they’d all go for them in FFAs and try to balance out the fun. Not as fun when playing the game with strangers.
Here are 5 reasons I think why this genre almost died when it did. When this genre was at its birth and/or peak: 1. There was no internet access as there is today (I was playing Quake 3 online with 350ms ping on a dial up connection) 2. There were no organized match queues for easy access to games, but rather a list of servers. 3. There was no actual ranking system or any way to distinguish players based on their skill and match them accordingly or even to know where you stand and improve. 4. Difficult access to affordable PC gear in a time where the graphics and other tech was exploding. Every game that came out needed a whole new setup and performance updates were almost non-existent. This lead to even more limited player counts. 5. Gaming was not yet mainstream, which means no patches, updates, media, streaming, youtube articles, guides, esports, gaming platforms to bring more people to try the game. Most of the times you would walk on the nearby store and buy the game that you “felt” it was a good pick. This genre simply rose in the wrong time and didn’t properly catch up. I don’t think difficulty and neither the dev nor the player choices was the problem, but rather a semi-functional sandboxy mess in a world where the internet was evolving and your hard earned accomplishments couldn’t be shared and get acknowledged outside of your room.
Its this simple… Modern competitive shooters (COD, APEX, OW) are designed TO MAKE NEW/BAD PLAYERS LOOK AND FEEL GOOD NO MATTER WHAT. Arena shooters (Quake, UT, Halo) by design MAKE NEW/BAD PLAYERS LOOK AND FEEL REALLY PATHETIC. Its like If I played Golf against Michael Jordan. He’s going to beat me. But Ill still hit a few good shots. Ill still be on the score card. Hell I might even get lucky and win a hole. But for sure, Ill feel like a beast competing against black Jesus himself. However If I played 1v1 basketball against MJ, Its not going to be competitive. Its going to be a blowout. Im not going to score. Im going to get dunked on. Its going to be pathetic and embarrassing. All my twitch followers will unsubscribe.
Bottom line; there hasnt been any good or better arena shooters made since Quake 3 and Unreal Tournaments … there just hasnt been. Its dead not from a lack of interest but from a lack of new quality title’s to push it forward. We got what ? Quake Champions ? That was, is, a buggy incomplete live service mess with mechanics that dont fit arena shooter formula. No server browsers, forced match making, character specific special moves, armor, health numbers etc etc.. its no wonder why that thing fails. We had a shot to get a new Unreal Tournament but that was shelved because of fortnite. People blame lack of gamer interest but they havent had anything new to scratch that itch the way Q3 and UT does. So… i blame a lack of developer interest and imagination a lot more than a lack of gamer interest. Ill bet that if someone like nightdive studios remasters say Quake 3 or any of the Unreal Tournaments, youll see exactly what i mean. The interest is there it just needs to be renewed with a real bonified, legit arena shooter for modern hardware wothout the b.s of live service, loot boxes, microtransactions, forced match making and other proprietary algorithms impeading the fun. Thats also why conversley; one isnt made. These shareholder driven AAA devs have to much cash, they dont know how to make anything without a way to also attempt to milk the gamer dry at every turn. If the fun cant be monetized waay beyond the 70 + dollar retail price, it simply isnt made in the AAA space. Thats why i say AAA devs are too big to actually make AAA games anymore.
It’s lost information now but what made Halo stand out heavily was that it combined arena shooters and tactical shooters into a somewhat mixed hybrid of its own. Splitgate I believe takes massive inspiration from Halo directly. Also a discussion about arena shooters and not a SINGLE mention of UT is simply unreal, it basically solved many of the grievances people had with Quake and it gets nothing from this article.
26 minutes of nonsense)) article games die when most players abandon them. And the entire list of Arena FPS features you described has nothing to do with most players. People play to have fun, and old school arena FPS fun is simply too outdated and too primitive. Today players choose character progression, grind, perks, loot and industry eagerly sell it to them.
I think an important point is that a lot of people just prefer playing team games. I love QC and QL, but they can get pretty lonely. I think Diabotical did a great job addressing this with great 1v1 and team gameplay, but we all know how the lifespan of that game went. With the growing popularity of learning movement tech in non arena fps games I don’t think it will be long before some dev team strikes gold and brings afps back into the mainstream
I think quake needs a ranking system like in chess or rainbow six. So new players get matched with each other. I still play quake 3 arena each day. The most important reason is it gets frustrating for new players. I played once against two of my coworkers they didn’t have a chance and it was also boring for me because it was too easy.
Really enjoying this article so far, thank you! A quick correction on the respawn timer for the megahealth in Quake 1, in case another comment hasn’t mentioned it yet, is that the timer is 20 seconds, not 90. The major difference being that the timer is linked to the person that last picked it up and will not start until that person’s health goes to 100 or below. In maps with multiple megahealth packs, like DM3 for example, it is possible to pick up all three and deny all other players the opportunity to even see one spawn for quite some time if you manage your battles well. (And armour in Quake 1 respawned in 20 seconds, rather than the 25 in Quake 3. Who knows why they made this change.) I miss this type of game a lot. What I’d give for Epic to take some of their Fortnite money and remake UT2004…
Cool article. Lots of games I loved to play. I got Quake 3 arena ported to the Oculus Quest 2. Wow thats a massive refresh on that game. Lots of fun and the movement mech (vision)now influenced by physical head movement gives it very fun experience. But whats up with the end of the article with that kid? He get caught with his webcam on?
@Skeleblood Has nobody thought of random item spawns? Give players 30 sec/ 1 min during a warmup to explore the map and strategize beforehand, I think this would help with the skill gap and player expression a bit. Maybe even have rounds (best of 3 or 7) and an economy to buy perks or ammo between rounds. Or, have a damage based upgrade perk system similar to what Apex implemented. It probably would mess up the gameplay, but maybe even have mpre modes with objectives. I wish I knew how to make games, I feel like a great Arena shooter would complement the shooter scene right now, which is mostly slow paced Tact shooters (Valorant/Counter Strike), or Battle royals which are fairly luck based.
Players today, and btw also players in 1999 were largely bad and not enduring enough to really put time into mastering a shooter with such a skill ceiling. I played TFC,Q3F,and various HL1 and Q3 mods at the time from 1999 to around 2005 when most of it had died down to just a super dedicated tiny fraction of players who were still left. I won two world titles with Team Germany in both TFC and Q3F but even for me, Rocket Arena and CPMA were too much to get used to. Item timing, total map control etc was just too much of a mindf*ck to fully master, so I only dabbled with it here and there while my cousin played for n!faculty, who were really good at the time. He played like a madman, 8-10 hours a day easy and he was REALLY good at the game but still nothing compared to the top players. So yeah, most people simply don’t want to put the time into these games anymore and even back then at the height of the hype around them, only a tiny group of players had both the time AND the natural skill to shine. All these games today are a complete joke to people who understood how much dedication and skill you needed to win ANYTHING in Q3 and other arcade shooters of the late 90s and early 2000s.
People don’t like losing to superior skill and talent. These fast paced games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, Tribes etc. reward talent. Physical gifts that some people simply cannot touch. People don’t like feeling inferior, which these games WILL make you feel eventually unless you are physically gifted enough to reach the pinnacle levels of play. You don’t “learn” to be LeBron James in basketball and you don’t “learn” to be a top Quake arena player. You either have the talent or you don’t.
Good article but I still want to mention that the plasma gun has the most damage/second and that the shotgun is also extremely powerful at a close distance. You often see pro players switch from one of the three “main weapons” as you call them to another weapon, even something like the machine gun or the nade launcher. I would say that every weapon has it’s usage, they are just more situational.
aren fps are not just “too hard”. every pvp game is as hard as any other pvp game, because the relational skill within playerbase dictates what makes a game “hard”. also, look at fortnite with its insane building mechanic or valorant/counter strike aim and their tactical demands. you could have skipped the whole gameplay/mechanics section. it’s just about keeping players interested, even if they don’t do well. in arena fps there is just nothing which keeps you going when you get owned 50-0 against some skilled player. in order to become a decent player and have a feeling of real success you would need to grind hundreds of hours and THAT’s what makes players don’t stick to arena fps – it’s just not fun for most people. there are exceptions of players, especially the now old fucks (including me) which didn’t have other game options and were forced to play those arena fps. there was just no fortnite or any other modern rewarding game. to argue that non-arena fps are “easier” is just nonsense.
Arena shooters still aren’t dead. I don’t know why people keep saying that. They breathe and are alive. For sure, they are not what they used to be, they are not thriving but they are not dead. Also on Quake weapons; While yes, you use LG, RL and RG the most, I wouldn’t say other weapons are niche or you use them only if you don’t have any of the 3. MG is the perfect starting weapon; having unlimited range and you can do instantly little damage. SG is well, shotgun; crazy damage at point blank range or decent damage even at long range. GL you almost never get a kill but it’s actually one of the most important weapons in the game as you can shoot places where other weapons can’t reach. PG will actually be the best DPS if you can somehow hit your shots but it’s usually best at holding or do little damage jumps.