When did Old School FPS fans turn around on Halo?

[BGreener]

Oh boy, this recent matchmaking discussion is giving me “Not Balanced For Lean” PTSD…

 

23 hours ago, banjiepixel said:

I hated Halo because slow and generic it was. My views have softened since and after playing Halo Reach, I can say atleast that there are much more worse FPS game series to play. But Halo games are pretty boring and have just this low energy feel to them. I however would rank them above the Call of Duty games, atleast Halo has some enemy variety.

 

Reach is also when they implemented a sprint so you weren’t always so “early/mid 2000s shooter” slow.

[DuckReconMajor]

I always saw Halo getting more love from classic fps fans than Call of Duty. I never understood it. In Call of Duty you didn't move like a fucking tank.

I eventually came around on Halo somewhat but I'll always prefer Call of Duty and consider it the one more in line with old-school FPS gameplay

[dasho]

29 minutes ago, DuckReconMajor said:

I always saw Halo getting more love from classic fps fans than Call of Duty. I never understood it. In Call of Duty you didn't move like a fucking tank.

I eventually came around on Halo somewhat but I'll always prefer Call of Duty and consider it the one more in line with old-school FPS gameplay

 

Call of Duty was fine until it degenerated into campaigns where you are supposedly the leader of a squad but everyone stacks up on a door and doesn't do anything except tell you to go through the door until you get to your destination, at which an explosion of some kind either renders you unconscious, collapses the floor underneath you, or both.

[CFWMagic]

1 hour ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Yeah WTF is that take, matchmaking is one of the absolute worst things to happen to online games besides SBMM

 

2 hours ago, segfault said:

 

Halo 2's multiplayer was certainly great but the matchmaking model would eventually be the downfall of multiplayer FPS. Putting everybody into a single queue destroyed the flourishing communities of people, engendered toxicity, and overall eventually made online play a miserable experience.

 

All that said I definitely remember the distaste PC FPS fans had for Halo at the time. Personally I enjoyed Halo CE on my PC but I could understand why people didn't like it. Nowadays given about 20 years of hindsight it's pretty clear that Counter-Strike has much more in common with the modern FPS than Halo ever did.

Matchmaking is one of the biggest reasons I absolutely despise CS:GO. That and what I view as "forced competition". I despise ranks, despise matchmaking, stat tracking ... All of it. Thanks to Quake 3 A/TA, maybe. But it's bigger than that. It feels forced. It feels like handholding. It feels extremely patronizing. And on top of that, this forced competition means that there is no place for anything but it. Doom Eternal is a perfect example of this. Because of forced "competition" with battle mode, the console must be locked away.

Mods used to take extra steps because the pseudo-competitive community needs to be catered to and hand-held. And that often happens at the expense of everyone else. The classic saying of "Don't like it, don't play it" doesn't work here. Because even if I don't play in these fake competition modes, it STILL affects the game as a whole, making it less flexible and less accessible, all for the sake of some snooty elitists who can't be bothered setting up their own competition leagues and need their pee-pee measuring contest to merged with the game itself so that the rest of us can't play without mandatory penis inspection ...

/rant

Edited November 23, 2022 by CFWMagic

[7Mahonin]

Because gooble gobble, one of us, We accept Halo. 

[mrthejoshmon]

Matmaking is great if I want to go in quick, be fucking miserable, suffer host migrations (a true Halo Reach experience is at least 5 per game), have the lobby not backfill if anyone leaves and then have a random chance of meeting the same 2000 hour try-hard bang-outs who literally creampied the entire team 1 game ago as well as getting maps and gamemodes I would sooner print out 3d models of and bludgeon myself with then actually play (Gephyrophobia 2 flag CTF can burn).

[OpenRift]

23 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

 ...I remember people complaining about Doom 2016 being like Halo (which is grasping at rather ethereal, non-corporeal straws) but not much else.

I think this was in regards to Doom 2016's multiplayer, because of the 2-weapon limit. Correct me if I'm wrong, but iirc there were some Halo MP devs that worked on Doom 2016's multiplayer or something like that.

[magicsofa]

On 11/21/2022 at 3:12 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

Remember when older FPS fans hated Halo for regenerating health, a two-weapon limit and cutscenes?

 

Not really... I thought the level design in the second half was the most heavily criticized thing, which is fair because it really drags. I don't know how much "older" you are talking about, I was probably 13 when I played it. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Regenerating health is something I don't like, but it would be a bit ridiculous to throw out the whole game just for that.

[LexiMax]

5 hours ago, segfault said:

Halo 2's multiplayer was certainly great but the matchmaking model would eventually be the downfall of multiplayer FPS. Putting everybody into a single queue destroyed the flourishing communities of people, engendered toxicity, and overall eventually made online play a miserable experience.

 

I think it's easy to point out the flaws of matchmaking today, but server browsers had tons of problems of their own.

• Servers are a really bad fit for game modes with low playercounts or where joining a game mid-match might be disruptive.
• Server owners gravitate towards running single gamemode servers with large playercounts and a single map or heavily truncated map pool, because that draws the highest playercounts due to name recognition.  MM allows me to play the entire game that I paid for, not just dust2 or facing worlds.
• If the game is old enough, occupied servers likely aren't even running the vanilla game anymore.  Hope you like a class system and experience points giving you ingame stat advantages and a grapple hook, plus random UT99 announcer quips played globally when someone gets a headshot.
• It's too hard to play with friends unless you know how to run a private server or you are okay with being on separate teams.
• Server browsers also had toxic or even exploitative communities.  For every 2F2F there were a dozen "Pay $10 a month for admin rights" servers.

I could list more, but I'll end with an anecdote.  I stopped playing TF2 for years after my favorite server cluster got banished to "24/7 Mario Kart" hell.  Valve Matchmaking is why I came back and put a fair number of additional hours into it.

 

That said, matchmaking also has issues, and I think games should ideally have both - matchmaking for standard play, private lobbies for fooling around with friends, and a server browser for public lobbies and mods.

 

4 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

Yeah WTF is that take, matchmaking is one of the absolute worst things to happen to online games besides SBMM 

 

SBMM is good for competitive modes.  I agree that it's silly in the context of casual play though.

Edited November 23, 2022 by AlexMax

[Tetzlaff]

On 11/21/2022 at 9:12 PM, Mr. Freeze said:

Remember when older FPS fans hated Halo for regenerating health, a two-weapon limit and cutscenes? 

 

Hated for cutscenes? Around 2000 every FPS tried to boost it's storytelling with cutscenes. I remember even Quake mods of that time trying to incorporate lenghty cutscenes, even if the results looked clumsy and not really worth all the trouble...

 

 

For the other things - I remember that players hated that many FPS games after Halo adopted the weapon limit and regenerating shield/health system in a lazy way. Didn't Halo feature a regenerating shield plus health pickups? Many games implemented complete regen health so the map designers could just skip the process of thoughtful item placement in their levels.

Edited November 23, 2022 by Tetzlaff

[wuunds]

23 minutes ago, Tetzlaff said:

 

Hated for cutscenes? Around 2000 every FPS tried to boost it's storytelling with cutscenes. I remember even Quake mods of that time trying to incorporate lenghty cutscenes, even if the results looked clumsy and not really worth all the trouble...

 

 

For the other things - I remember that players hated that many FPS games after Halo adopted the weapon limit and regenerating shield/health system in a lazy way. Didn't Halo feature a regenerating shield plus health pickups? Many games implemented complete regen health so the map designers could just skip the process of thoughtful item placement in their levels.

Yes, Halo had an actual heath bar along with the shield. Health pickups were pretty rare (if I remember correctly) so while the shield could quickly fill up, it encouraged you to be careful in combat. The health regen system you see today actually comes from Halo 2. Bungie just completely removed the health bar in favor of making the shield just your health instead.

[CFWMagic]

1 hour ago, AlexMax said:

 

I think it's easy to point out the flaws of matchmaking today, but server browsers had tons of problems of their own.

• Servers are a really bad fit for game modes with low playercounts or where joining a game mid-match might be disruptive.
• Server owners gravitate towards running single gamemode servers with large playercounts and a single map or heavily truncated map pool, because that draws the highest playercounts due to name recognition.  MM allows me to play the entire game that I paid for, not just dust2 or facing worlds.
• If the game is old enough, occupied servers likely aren't even running the vanilla game anymore.  Hope you like a class system and experience points giving you ingame stat advantages and a grapple hook, plus random UT99 announcer quips played globally when someone gets a headshot.
• It's too hard to play with friends unless you know how to run a private server or you are okay with being on separate teams.
• Server browsers also had toxic or even exploitative communities.  For every 2F2F there were a dozen "Pay $10 a month for admin rights" servers.

I could list more, but I'll end with an anecdote.  I stopped playing TF2 for years after my favorite server cluster got banished to "24/7 Mario Kart" hell.  Valve Matchmaking is why I came back and put a fair number of additional hours into it.

 

That said, matchmaking also has issues, and I think games should ideally have both - matchmaking for standard play, private lobbies for fooling around with friends, and a server browser for public lobbies and mods.

 

 

SBMM is good for competitive modes.  I agree that it's silly in the context of casual play though.

Debatable. Extremely so.

- MM with low playercounts is even worse. If without it, you can escape that one guy who plays since day one and roflstomps the rest of the playerbase singlehandedly ... With low playercount matchmaking, the only way you can escape him is by not playing the game. So I'd argue it's even worse with MM since it'll expedite exodus via player frustration. As for joining a game mid-match, that's more of a game-design issue rather than the server model issue. Simply have the joining player be spectator until a round is over.

- In theory, MM rotating maps is a good thing and forces players to play maps they don't want to play. In practice, if MM forces me to play a map that I don't want to play, I'm leaving the game. The perfect example of this is the very de_dust2 problem that you mentionned. Compare matchmaking time between de_dust2 and literally any other map. Dust 2 is a few seconds. Any other map is a few minutes. Instead of directly joining an empty server with a few friends and starting play, while waiting for more people to join, I'll be waiting half an hour. So again, arguably, MM not only doesn't solve the problem, but makes it much worse while also increasing player frustration by attempting to force players something they don't want to play.

- I fail to see how modded games are exclusive to the server model. If you're saying that match-making is good because the game can't be modified at all in the first place, then you're basically advocating against extending the lifetime of the game in the first place. Sure, old Quake 3 servers are all modded. If it was MM, and modded Quake 3 wasn't a thing, there would be no old Quake 3 servers at all in the first place.

- Running private servers is something I do very tacitly agree on, because Hamachi can be a pain in the butt. But then again, I view that more as user error rather than server error. Setting up Hamachi isn't rocket science. It's not too hard. It's that the average user is too lazy to google it. It can be argued that you shouldn't have to google and read at all, so I partially concede here. Still. In my eyes, if you're not capable of basic literacy and patience ... That's on you.

- Exploitative servers, that I actually agree on. But again, it's not something matchmaking solves. Instead of some random 12 years old making himself pocket money by nickel and diming you, it's now corporate doing this via gambling for skins and such. And because all the official servers are locked behind the pretense of competiveness and matchmaking, all the ADHD/OCD people who want their pixels to look a bit different now have no choice than to gamble. So once again, I don't think MM solved the problem. Probably made it even worse.

Ultimately I do agree with you that ideally games should have both. But I would switch those around. Matchmaking for all the competitive players only, while private lobbies and servers should be the default, Arma 3 style.

[LexiMax]

53 minutes ago, CFWMagic said:

MM with low playercounts is even worse.

 

Correct, matchmaking plain doesn't work with low playercounts, so server lists are pretty much necessary at that point.  I couldn't imagine matchmaking working with any online doom ports, for example.

 

53 minutes ago, CFWMagic said:

In practice, if MM forces me to play a map that I don't want to play, I'm leaving the game.

 

I am willing to put up with playing overplayed maps and game modes as long as I eventually get some variety, but the 24/7 mentality literally kills games for me and prevents me from even getting past the server list - the game might as well not exist for me at this point.

 

53 minutes ago, CFWMagic said:

If it was MM, and modded Quake 3 wasn't a thing, there would be no old Quake 3 servers at all in the first place.

 

That's more because the Quake 3 model of arena shooters were inaccessible and lacked staying power, so all you have left are grognards trying to squeeze blood from a stone.  CS 1.0 came out a year after Q3A and Halo:CE came out a year after that, and I can quite easily get matchmade games out of both CS:GO and MCC, which are largely the same game with a modern coat of paint.

 

That said, once the playerbase dwindles, server browsers are indeed all you have.

 

53 minutes ago, CFWMagic said:

Running private servers is something I do very tacitly agree on, because Hamachi can be a pain in the butt. But then again, I view that more as user error rather than server error.

 

We have to deal with someone trying to self-host a server on Odamex on a weekly basis and it's soul-rending, because it's so much worse of an experience than it needs to be.  Players are now conditioned to be able to effortlessly play with just their friends whenever they want.  The TSPG model sort of works as a workaround, but it requires a ton of development work by a third party and a benevolant server host to keep it running, when it should just be built into the game.

Edited November 24, 2022 by AlexMax

[Endless]

If I'm being honest I always found Halo to be very boring to play, and what actually made it standout was the intricate worldbuilding and great levels that were expansive and creative. I remember playing CE and the worst missions were the ones against the Flood, because it really opened your eyes as to how obnoxious the gameplay and gun system is. I then played Halo 3, Reach and 4, and found all of those to be just very eh. Was having more fun with the cinematics and interactions. Tried to replay the series again with Master Chief Collection, but it was more of the same, but better graphics.

 

I think it was a great series, even if the gameplay wasn't my cup of tea, I did enjoyed the maps and the story a lot.

[dasho]

21 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

That's more because the Quake 3 model of arena shooters were inaccessible.

 

What does this mean, exactly?

[indigotyrian]

2 hours ago, AlexMax said:

 

I think it's easy to point out the flaws of matchmaking today, but server browsers had tons of problems of their own.

• Servers are a really bad fit for game modes with low playercounts or where joining a game mid-match might be disruptive.
• Server owners gravitate towards running single gamemode servers with large playercounts and a single map or heavily truncated map pool, because that draws the highest playercounts due to name recognition.  MM allows me to play the entire game that I paid for, not just dust2 or facing worlds.
• If the game is old enough, occupied servers likely aren't even running the vanilla game anymore.  Hope you like a class system and experience points giving you ingame stat advantages and a grapple hook, plus random UT99 announcer quips played globally when someone gets a headshot.
• It's too hard to play with friends unless you know how to run a private server or you are okay with being on separate teams.
• Server browsers also had toxic or even exploitative communities.  For every 2F2F there were a dozen "Pay $10 a month for admin rights" servers.

I could list more, but I'll end with an anecdote.  I stopped playing TF2 for years after my favorite server cluster got banished to "24/7 Mario Kart" hell.  Valve Matchmaking is why I came back and put a fair number of additional hours into it.

 

That said, matchmaking also has issues, and I think games should ideally have both - matchmaking for standard play, private lobbies for fooling around with friends, and a server browser for public lobbies and mods.

 

 

SBMM is good for competitive modes.  I agree that it's silly in the context of casual play though.

 

• Matchmaking is even worse for lower player counts than the server model. Hope you like sitting at a waiting screen for five minute intervals! Between every game! (As an aside, servers are not at all a bad fit for when player lock-in is required: Age of Empires 2 and Warcraft 3 both used the server model to great effect.)
• For every 24/7 2fort/granary server there were three servers dedicated to running the full gamut, or at the very least had all the maps for a specific game mode.
• These servers were really not the plague you described, and furthermore being able to actually mod these experiences in is honestly a positive in my book. Your modern multiplayer game utterly rejects modding because it spits in the face of the exploitative live service model. I'd rather have the occasional annoying server with dumb stat rank bullshit spamming up the chat and Sexy UT Announcer Quips that I can turn off with !quakesounds instead of the bullshit we have today.
• Difficulty playing with friends online isn't a problem with the server model, it's a problem with network implementation -- something that's recently been resolved with the advent of UPNP hole-punching and other technologies. You could absolutely do easy friends-only games with the server model if you don't require players to set up port forwarding on their router.
• Bad servers exist for the same reason bad websites or bad communities exist. You're not going to be able to stamp out bad behavior, and it's certainly not an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Would you rather have the bad actors exist in their own little cesspits or have them in the same solo queue as you where they can show up in your game and scream racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs, with basically no recourse except maybe a mute button? Most of the time you can't even leave a game they show up in without accruing some manner of bullshit penalty for early leaving.
• SSBM is still bad for competitive modes. Despite the best efforts of basically every game to reinvent sports statistics from first principles, skill designation keeps swinging back to Elo, which is a very poor measurement of individual performance in team games -- 95% of what matchmaking in online shooter games are nowadays. Elo might be better for one-on-one games but the front-and-center nature of it, where players are given a numerical value they have little (if any) control over, are judged and even segregated based on that number, is a breeding ground for toxicity.

You want to know why online video game spaces are so nasty? It's because they're designed to be that way by the developers. Emphasis is put not on making a fun experience but on keeping butts in seats for as long as possible because that increases the likelihood of a microtransaction. Players are skinner-boxed into spending as much time glued to a game as possible in order to keep the dopamine trail going, they're cut off from making any meaningful connections with other people inside the game, they're sorted by a bullshit algorithm that tells them, in no uncertain terms, their net worth as a person boiled down into a single statistic derived by probably the single most irrelevant set of data points one can use to actually determine player competency, they're beset on all sides by frustrated people who are exposed to all of the above and despite mounting irritation keep themselves on the trail because they've formed an addiction, and you have a recipe for utter disaster. All of this is possible because of the matchmaking model. Get rid of it.

[LexiMax]

26 minutes ago, dasho said:

What does this mean, exactly? 

 

I think the comparative staying power of Halo and CS is that they are just fundamentally more accessible games to play than Quake.

 

I don't think it's any one thing about Quake, as most games have things like movement tech and less intuitive mechanics that are integral to playing well, but if you go back in time it's a pretty clear pattern.  Developers have been trying to repackage Quake-style arena shooters for the better part of two decades and it has never found a wide audience like it did in the late 90's, when Q3A and UT99 were two name brands up against very weak competition.  Since then, we've had one more hit - UT2004 - and many more misses that failed to attract a wider audience.  From the free and open source shooters like Warsow, old Nexuiz, Open Arena, to the retail games Quake 4 and UT3, the abandoned UT4, Quake Live, Quake Champions, and then of course paid indie games like the new Nexuiz, Reflex Arena and Toxikk, and probably more I'm forgetting.

 

Meanwhile, Halo-style arena shooters are still trucking ahead with MCC and Halo: Infinite being successful, alongside the indie effort Splitgate attracting a decent audience.  And it turns out there is room in the market for TWO Counter-Strike games with CS:GO and Valorant.  There's just something about Quake-style arena shooters that makes most gamers bounce off them and not want to continue playing them.

Edited November 24, 2022 by AlexMax

[indigotyrian]

1 minute ago, AlexMax said:

Meanwhile, Halo-style arena shooters are still trucking ahead with MCC and Halo: Infinite being successful, alongside the indie effort Splitgate attracting a decent audience.  And it turns out there is room in the market for TWO Counter-Strike games with CS:GO and Valorant.  There's just something about Quake-style arena shooters that makes most gamers not want to play them.

 

Have you seen what today's kids are doing to FPS games?

 

 

[CFWMagic]

32 minutes ago, dasho said:

 

What does this mean, exactly?

 

 

9 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

 

I can't pin it down what exactly it is about Quake that turns most gamers off, but if you go back in time it's a pretty clear pattern.

The simplest explanation to this is the learning curve. Try putting a newcomer against even a bad, but experienced Quake 3 A player. They're not going to make a single kill. Not a single one. Even if the newcomer has hours upon days upon months of time in other FPS games. The bad but experienced player will cut circles around the talented but new player simply by strafejumping all over the place and stacking weapons, ammo, armor and health to the point where the newcomer won't be able to kill them even if they hit them with a railgun a couple times.

Strafing is just one part of it, too. Take into account that timing your pickups, knowing your routes and knowing your weapons are about 50% of the gameplay, and you make any new player completely worthless for their first week of play. That's why Quake Live didn't take off. And that's why Quake Champions hard-capped strafe speed. But that ultimately killed QC, because new players would STILL get roflstomped by anybody who can strafe worth a damn, while the old players despise the hard-caps because it actually doesn't allow them to play at a higher skill level like they can with Q3 or QL.

To put it simply, Alex's initial assessment of Q3A is perfectly on point. Playing Quake 3 Arena is like squeezing blood out of a stone. You'll tear your nails off trying, but when you actually succeed it'll be hard to let go because now you can bash people across the head with a bloody stone.

EDIT:

And what @segfault says is also true, make no mistake. There are forms of trickjumping in CS:GO, and the videos provided are a good example of this. The major difference being, it's less prevalent in these games and tends to be something that only a few people know about and effectively exploit. That's assuming these exploits don't get patched. Meanwhile, Quake 3 strafe jumping is the norm. Every player worth a damn will strafejump, time their pickups, learn routes and physics so they can spam rockets and grenades, learn sound so they can flick railgun shots at teleporters without even looking ... Sure, you can replicate some of this in modern games. Warsow tried for instance. But nothing comes quite as far as Quake 3 Arena. And that's if we're just playing Vanilla Q3A. Q3 CPM is a whole different beast, which makes things much, much faster and adds a couple more layers of complexity.

Edited November 24, 2022 by CFWMagic

[LexiMax]

5 minutes ago, segfault said:

Have you seen what today's kids are doing to FPS games?

 

Yeah, and none of them are playing Quake-style arena shooters. 🙂 I think @CFWMagic put it better and more authoritatively than I ever could.

 

[indigotyrian]

5 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

 

Yeah, and none of them are playing Quake-style arena shooters. 🙂 I think @CFWMagic put it better and more authoritatively than I ever could.

 

 

My point is that the desire for a movement shooter is there! They're going for other games because of the disconnect between "new hotness" vs "decades old grognard." If you made a new game with core principles like Quake's but without the specific sort of advanced tech (straferunning etc.) you'd have a lot of people enjoying it. In fact, that's basically exactly what happened with Halo Infinite. To bring the topic round back, Infinite's essentially this generation's version of the Movement Shooter. Players love it (though they dislike 343's handling of the game, but that's a completely separate discussion) especially with the recent release of Forge. If Infinite's proven anything, it's that the old ways of doing multiplayer games are not only viable, they're superior; studios choose not to do them because doing otherwise means greater profits.

Edited November 24, 2022 by segfault

[LexiMax]

11 minutes ago, segfault said:

If you made a new game with core principles like Quake's but without the specific sort of advanced tech (straferunning etc.) you'd have a lot of people enjoying it

 

Yep, and that game was called Halo:CE.

 

Halo is an arena shooter, but without most of the BS that makes gamers hate arena shooters.

 

And people play it to this day, with populated matchmaking, thanks to MCC.  And it also has successful contemporaries.

Edited November 24, 2022 by AlexMax

[CFWMagic]

19 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

 

Yep, and that game was called Halo:CE.

 

Halo is an arena shooter, but without most of the BS that makes gamers hate arena shooters.

 

And people play it to this day, with populated matchmaking, thanks to MCC.

I think I see the point that segfault is trying to make too. The point being about movement, rather than the focus on arena-battles itself. A good example of this would be the game known as Tribes: Ascend, which is basically Counter Strike style glides and physics shooting like Q3's railgun/rocket combos. And that misses the point of Q3 a little. Because Q3's strafejumping is several times more complicated than Tribes ascend.

The very idea of Quake strafejumping is initially a bug. So, to strafejump optimally, you need some VERY specific input. For example, to do standard full-beat strafes, you need to:

1. Hold forward and strafe
2. Aim your mouse in the direction of your strafe, at a very specific angle (Too steep and you'll stop. Too shallow and you won't accelerate enough)
3. Keep moving your mouse in the direction of your strafe, at a very specific speed (Too fast and you'll slow down. Too slow and you won't accelerate enough)
4. Keep jumping right before you hit the ground, while making sure to hold space as little as possible (jump too soon and you lose all speed. Jump too slow and you take a massive hit to your speed. Hold space too long and you take a minor hit to your speed or fail to accelerate optimally)

And if you're going to really optimize your strafes (say, for Quake 3 DeFRaG) then you also need to know some mapping bullshit, because the specific angles at which you need to keep your mouse to accelerate most are going to be based on the map's grid. This is not something I'm willing to explain myself because I suck at it.

And this is just to strafe a single step. In a direct line. Now, imagine that you also need to switch your directions while strafejumping, because strafing in a single direction obviously turns you in that direction. You occasionally need to alternate your beats, meaning you have to anticipate how many jumps you're going to make in a specific direction before you switch, or if you're doing VQ3, you need to know where your straight lines are so you can half-beat without switching sides (a completely different strafing method).

Now, remember that this is entry-level Quake 3 gameplay. To be competitive, you need to know how to:

- Overbounce, which is exploiting map tricks to essentially transfer your falling momentum into jump momentum
- Circlejump, which is what you use to extend the length of your jumps and gain extra speed before you start your strafejumps
- Plasma/Rocket climb, which is riding walls while using your weapons. To do this, you need to know very specific angles to point your weapon at, and also anticipate the amount of health you will lose by essentially riding your own AOE.

And that's "just" movement. I didn't even mention that you need to know your maps, your projectile trajectories and speeds, enemy trajectory and speed ... Then you need to calculate how to make your projectile hit the enemy, or if you suck at that,  you need to practice hard enough to either anticipate enemy motion to hit them with hitscan, or literally have twitch reflexes which allow you to railgun a target moving at about 4 times the normal run speed, within the space of about a fraction of a second. And again, we're assuming all of this is VQ3 (Vanilla Quake 3) physics, because if we're touching CPM physics, that's a completely different can of worms. No, it's not "just" air control.

Here. Have an example of Quake 3 DeFRaG, a variation of Quake 3 which deals with only movement. Try and figure out all the technical things that each player needs to do to achieve their runs. Your head will hurt by just watching:
 

EDIT: Sorry, I kind of got sidetracked ... I suppose my original point was a response to why Quake 3 Arena is much more unique (and painful) than any iteration of both Arena and/or Movement based shooters out there. To this day, I don't know a single game with as much complexity as Quake 3. Not one. The learning curve is absolutely staggering. But that's also why you still have people seriously competing in it, to this day. Once you actually see, learn, practice these elements of Quake 3 ... The versatility is just as staggering as the learning curve and just as rewarding.

Edited November 24, 2022 by CFWMagic

[indigotyrian]

43 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

 

Yep, and that game was called Halo:CE.

 

Halo is an arena shooter, but without most of the BS that makes gamers hate arena shooters.

 

And people play it to this day, with populated matchmaking, thanks to MCC.  And it also has successful contemporaries.

 

Except the matchmaking is broken and would be way better if it operated under a server model, which is incidentally how El Dewrito operated (and was way better for it). Matchmaking removes the ability for miniature communities to form within games and instead forces people to meet elsewhere, thus reducing the overall surface volume for player cohesion and ultimately erodes the social aspect of multiplayer gaming.

Edited November 24, 2022 by segfault

[heliumlamb]

adding to the discourse:

 

custom game lobbies (especially in 3 and Reach)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>anything on a server browser>>>>>>>>>>>>matchmaking in general.

the chaos of some rando's modded game variant on a forge map that brings the console to its knees with a bunch of other people who are likely also trying to figure what the fuck is going on will still be the best experience of playing video games online with some sort of opposition. certainly better than being told to off yourself repeatedly for the heinous act of putting oxygen into your lungs and taking carbon dioxide out of them. or the even worse act of bringing their arbitrary "how good i am compared to all the other people wasting their time on this game" number down

Edited November 24, 2022 by heliumlamb

[dasho]

I guess all I'm reading indicates that "not accessible" means "no handholding and a high skill ceiling." I'm not sure what else to think. I grew up with QuakeWorld, GameSpy 3D, MSN Gaming Zone, etc, and don't recall ever feeling like the game was "not accessible", which to me would mean that it's overly complicated to set up or play (as an example, this is how I view things like Hideous Destructor). Sure, I got my shit stomped in a lot until I got better, but that was about it. If you're talking about being competitive at the upper echelons, Q3A would be a poor choice to get into these days as it's had two decades for people to optimize.

Edited November 24, 2022 by dasho

[LexiMax]

1 hour ago, segfault said:

Matchmaking removes the ability for miniature communities to form within games and instead forces people to meet elsewhere, thus reducing the overall surface volume for player cohesion and ultimately erodes the social aspect of multiplayer gaming. 

 

There's nothing wrong with people meeting elsewhere.  I've noticed that in smaller games, the focal point of the community isn't generally on the server, but on the shared chat platform, which is usually a forum, built-in chat box, or Discord server.  Some even-smaller games don't even have a constant set of players willing to populate a server - certain niche fighting games come to mind - so often those chat platforms are the way those games survive.

 

But the same holds true for bigger games - people meet outside of the game, and then queue as a group for matchmaking so they can play with their friends.  I've lost track of the number of times I've joined a gaming Discord only to find a stack in a public voice channel queueing for Fortnite, Dead by Daylight or what have you*.  Those folks are certainly being social.

 

So what about the solo queuing experience?  Frankly, I don't find queuing for matchmaking any more toxic than joining a random server from an old server browser game at their peak - you were just as likely to run into assholes then as you are now, and half the time the server admins were either not paying attention or complicit in what was happening on their server.  It's just that the assholes have moved on to matchmade games because most games have matchmaking these days, so it's easy to get rose-tinted glasses about the good old days.

 

* EDIT: Heck, it doesn't even need to be a gaming Discord - I was thumbing through my servers just now and found a stack on a non-gaming Discord playing Apex Legends together.

Edited November 24, 2022 by AlexMax

[Budoka]

The only feeling I ever had towards the Halo series for most of its existence was mere curiosity. I knew its reputation as the Xbox killer app but I never once had an opportunity to play it until the Remastered Collection on Steam. I found it to be pretty great, and I also found that I suck at it pretty bad for that's worth (the Covenant enemies in particular don't play to the strengths of a classic Doomer, requiring a lot of adaptation on my part). Also, let's be fair, the original at least does have an issue with excessively recycling its own level design, many times with literally no changes whatsoever. By the way, I'm really not sure why critics often lump this series in together with generic military shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield since... it isn't anything like them?

[Ludi]

As someone who beat every Halo game on the Master Chief collection 5 years ago as a 13 year old, Halo is boring as shit. Halo is a C-tier (boomer shooter?) at best. I hate to be that guy, but playing Doom and Quake well after Halo completely soured my opinion of the series.

[indigotyrian]

32 minutes ago, AlexMax said:

 

There's nothing wrong with people meeting elsewhere.  I've noticed that in smaller games, the focal point of the community isn't generally on the server, but on the shared chat platform, which is usually a forum, built-in chat box, or Discord server.  Some even-smaller games don't even have a constant set of players willing to populate a server - certain niche fighting games come to mind - so often those chat platforms are the way those games survive.

 

But the same holds true for bigger games - people meet outside of the game, and then queue as a group for matchmaking so they can play with their friends.  I've lost track of the number of times I've joined a gaming Discord only to find a stack in a public voice channel queueing for Fortnite, Dead by Daylight or what have you.  Those folks are certainly being social.

 

So what about the solo queuing experience?  Frankly, I don't find queuing for matchmaking any more toxic than joining a random server from an old server browser game at their peak - you were just as likely to run into assholes then as you are now, and half the time the server admins were either not paying attention or complicit in what was happening on their server.  It's just that the assholes have moved on to matchmade games because most games have matchmaking these days, so it's easy to get rose-tinted glasses about the good old days.

 

I don't want to have to join and manager a million discords to play with people. I want to have a destination, a place I can go and meet regulars in the game itself. This isn't "rose-tinted glasses," this is me mourning the death of the communities that I belonged to, replaced and gentrified with bullshit third-party apps and exploitative live service garbage. I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little disturbed at the erasure that's going on of my own damn history.