Why did Quake (and arena shooters) die?

Mid video

The real reason arena shooters died is because my steam library has every arena shooter and whenever a new player comes along I get a notification to come noob stomp them

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'm super sad (as an old UT player) that the new UT never really took off. It was meant to be THE arena shooter experience, and it got derailed so much...

Doom 2016 and eternal both missed the opportunity to bring back arena shooters. Used to love unreal tournament as a kid. Unreal tournament 3 on PS3 was bang on

I was always an Unreal Tournament player. Spent so much time in my teens back in 1999-2006 playing UT99 and then UT2k4. Really wish there was a way to bring these back and make them popular again.

It’s funny to how Halo gets so much crap for supposedly killing arena shooters yet counter strike seems to always get off Scott free in this discussion when I’d argue it did more damage to afps then halo ever did.

7:59 Quake 1 actually does have a form of autohop. If you release space after you jump and then press it back down, the game will buffer your jump input, so as soon as you hit the ground you jump again.

From someone who still plays Quakeworld, this is a pretty solid video. 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.

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.

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

One of the reasons I like Clan Arena in Quake Live/Open Arena, is that everyone has the same loadout, and there are no map powerups (which addresses the player choice/map issue). The tier system that QL used to have addressed the learning curve issue, but either way it's still a fun game :)

Man it’s crazy on how Unreal 2K4 is slept on. Such a fast and fun game that really had great maps and physics

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.

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. In TF2 or CoD, you always have access to your weapons-of-choice. You always have access to the tools that allow you to express the game's needed skills whereas in AFPS games you have to express a considerable amount of skill just to acquire and access those tools. It's a big reason why fighting games survive, and AFPS games die: In a fighting game you always have full access to your tools to express skill. In AFPS games the strategic factor of denying people access to their tools for long periods of time leads to a frustration that most people aren't willing to put up with. Whoever is on the losing end is going to have a bad time *for a long time*, and so without a captive audience, it's always going to lead to hemorrhaging players away.

Well done video. It's sad because these were some of the greatest games of all time, but the fact that it would be near impossible to balance making these games more accessible while keeping the fast paced high skill ceiling gameplay really made this an unwinnable gambit.

No game has come close to quake 3 when it comes to 1v1 fps duels.

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 video and agreed on all points.

Always fun to hop on Quake Live. Its a very special place. I've never seen so many gamers 40+ that are that good at fps games in one place.

As someone who grew up playing quake 3 and later quake live, it made me really happy to see someone talk about this so in depth. Really good vid.