#Discovered this forgotten gem.

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

crisp tapir
inland raptor
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action quake 2 is where cs started

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it was the first game i played

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some of the devs of aq2 went on to make urban terror

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and then a couple of them went on to create counter-strike

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aq2 is great

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if i had the means, i'd create a modern action quake

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its currently on steam btw

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1978800/AQtion/

Steam
AQtion

The classic game is back in AQTION! Play like you're the hero in an action movie in this fast-paced multiplayer FPS that spawned one of the most popular and influential games of all time, Counter-Strike. Realistic, locational damage and weapons are at your disposal, across over 600 community-made maps, dozens of player skins and models to choo...

▶ Play video
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the netcode is absolutely atrocious though as well as the server hitreg because it's using quake 2 with all it's 1997 tech

crisp tapir
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By the way, what's the best way to get into q2's multiplayer? Do I just use the vanilla game or a sourceport?

crisp tapir
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Also, I ended up covering this game, and I wanna tackle a few others during that era, including Urban Terror.

inland raptor
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its the "standalone" version of it

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instead of downloading q2 and pak0.pak and then action mod and everything else and configure it

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the game aqtion on steam is made by the aq2 community for people who want to try it and dont have to go around spending hours and days setting it up

inland raptor
crisp tapir
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llax8vFwJcE I just did it yesterday. It's not a thesis or anything, but it was a game I wanted to talk about.

YouTube
brokenportals
The Lost Forefather of Counter Strike - Action Quake 2

This was a total conversion mod for quake 2 that basically set the groundwork for Counter Strike due to some of the existing elements such as locational damage and recoil, as well as a modern day setting. Two of the creators
of Counter Strike had originally worked on this game.

The Action mod would then get two other sequels, one for Half Life...

▶ Play video
inland raptor
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thats a pretty cool video

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thanks for it

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aq2 was my first game

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played it for a year before i went to play cod4, quakelive, league of legends and so on

crisp tapir
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You're welcome. I covered what I could. I'm looking to cover either underrated projects or older projects people don't talk about much anymore.

inland raptor
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if i ever get to be a millionaire i'm remaking this game with a modern netcode and a more modern look

crisp tapir
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It almost happened actually but I don't think it went anywhere. There's this article that talks about it. https://www.pcgamesn.com/reaction/reaction-is-an-action-quake-2-remake-gunning-for-votes-on-steam-greenlight

PCGamesN
Reaction is an Action Quake 2 remake gunning for votes on Steam Gre...

The other week we wrote about the making of Counter-Strike - whose descendant, Global Offensive, we deemed one of the best first person shooters on PC - and mentioned Action Quake 2. We mentioned it because CS co-creator Minh Le worked on it, but it’s worth talking about in its own right as a real

inland raptor
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yea reaction quake 3

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was actually terrible

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first of all the physics of quake 3 are very different to quake 2

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the game felt extremely clunky on the q3 engine

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and it wasnt even made by actual game developers, just some aq2 fans

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so it kind of fumbled in various aspects

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sound wasnt great, hitboxes were weird

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lots of stuff

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from what i know, jehar from the quake community is trying to work on a action quake 2 remake, called midnight guns

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but i think it's mostly a remake and not necessarily a "modern version of aq2"

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i think he wants to keep it as similar to aq2 as possible, including the extremely old fashioned q2 netcode

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i might be wrong on that

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i hope i am

crisp tapir
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That sounds awesome! You don't see a lot of conversion projects or mods like this nowadays because of the many game engines available (Unity, Unreal, Godot etc). I'll definitely check it out if he ever succeeds with the project. I remember seeing Urban Terror being ported to unreal, but that was a lifetime ago now.

inland raptor
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looking at ur channel

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im surprised u dont have more quake videos

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was expecting a video like

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"why arena fps died"

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or

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"why arena fps will never be reborn"

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something along those lines

crisp tapir
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My bad, didn't mean to give you the wrong impression haha. I definitely wanna cover more arena based games but I don't wanna limit myself either.

inland raptor
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its cool

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i was just genuinuely curious

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about what your opinion about that topic is

crisp tapir
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I definitely would like to talk those topics. But there's really no single answer I don't think. I think it was a combination of different things that snowballed overtime. I'd have to take a deeper dive on the subject which will take some time.

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What would be your answer on why the genre declined?

inland raptor
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given i'm an arena fps player, it's something i've thought about most of my life

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and it wasnt until quake champions and diabotical were released

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and i tried to get some friends to play

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and saw streamers try out those games for the first time

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that i made sense to me

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why arena fps games are not popular at all anymore

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the first 30-50 hours of any game are supposed to be fun

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you might go through a small tutorial to get the very basics

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but then u have some fun, u shoot some targets, even if u die u get a couple of frags

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and u generally understand what's happening

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in every single arena fps released

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as a new player, you have no fucking idea what the actual fuck is happening

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you aren't allowed to have fun because everything is overwhelmingly confusing

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there are a few factors that make it confusing

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the pace of the game, it's usually very fast and chaotic

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the movement, which isn't very intuitive at all

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the maps, which are very arena like maps with lots of verticality that people arent used to

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the item pickups, which are also weird until you understand them since they keep respawning but at different times in most arena fps

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and the weapons, which are plenty of and all of them very different

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the first 4 things, you kind of have in different games, maybe not all at once, but you definitely have a few games with some of them, some to even higher depths

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fortnite can get very chaotic and fast, most battle royales item pickup system is incredibly complex

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some movement in some games is insane

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but the last thing is for me the biggest setback arena fps has

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the weapons

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there are about 8-9 different weapons in any arena fps

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they're all incredibly different and unintuitive

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and until you understand the basics of each weapon and when to use each

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you will not really understand what is happening

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and the biggest part of it

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is that you will have those 8-9 weapons in your arsenal at all times (provided you pick them up)

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and you will have no clue which one to use

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or which one you picked up in the previous fight

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or which one someone is shooting you with

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or which one you're using right now

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until you actually put some hours into the game

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the new player experience in any afps usually goes like this:

  • new player gets into a free for all game
  • spawns, immediately gets blown up by someone
  • spawns again, shoots at a target with the starting weapon (machinegun) and wonders why the target doesnt die
  • dies vs someone using another weapon
  • spawns, picks up a random weapon, wonders why he isnt shooting a machinegun anymore but is now shooting what seems like rockets and doesnt know where to aim them
  • wonders why he cant hit anyone
  • gets blown up by someone
  • respawns, walks around shooting machinegun and randomly pickups another weapon
  • wonders what the fuck this weapon does
  • gets blown up by someone
  • respawns, wonders why everyone is walking so much faster than him and why he keeps dying
  • gets blown up by someone
  • quits
crisp tapir
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That was really insightful, thanks for all the info 🙂

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Also, regarding the maps. They're also generally small and you don't really have any time to breathe. In games like Apex and Titanfall 2 movement is fast but the space is wide, you can take a moment to get your surroundings. You cannot do that in any traditional arena fps.

inland raptor
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i can quite honestly go on for a couple of hours about this

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could write a thesis about afps at this point

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yes

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the good thing about battle royales

crisp tapir
inland raptor
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is that, even if the game has a LOT of stuff

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you can play it at your own pace

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you can rat it out quietly, hide about the map as you want, or go all in, die and go next game

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in quake you are put on the spot on a very chaotic high pressure situation ALL THE TIME

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it's a constant do or die situation

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arena fps never really evolved past quake

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whether u think about quake 1 or quake champions or diabotical or any of the 58 quake clones that came out, as well as unreal tournament

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it has all those same 5 pointers, with the weapons being the biggest gatekeeper of fun

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and well, technically, arena fps did evolve

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but to a point where it's not considered arena fps anymore

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as you're familiar with team fortress 2 and overwatch

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they are arena fps games that have evolved

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they segregated the hardest part of the game

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the weapons, and made it class base

crisp tapir
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Maybe that's just it. The scale got larger and they just became something else.

inland raptor
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so that people can learn them at their own pace

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in their own time, how they choose to

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imagine if in tf2 instead of classes you only had 1 hero and he had all the weapons

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suddenly the game goes from fun

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to a fucking nightmare

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same with overwatch, instead of one weapon per hero, suddenly u have one hero with the best movement abilities and access to all the weapon

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well shit, ur back in quake

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but having all of the weapons at once is kind of what makes arena fps unique

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that dance of quake, in a fight with someone else

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and u have infinite weapons due to the high time to kill and the vast arsenal

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u can change to any weapon, so can he, change ranges and use the appropriate weapon, etc

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that's why the people that fell in love quake always come back to it

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there is nothing quite like it

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but sadly, to get to experience that peak, you need to submit yourself to 50-100 hours of torture

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so no one does

crisp tapir
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You were right about quake reaching the peak of that style of gameplay. Some of the clones were really good but they were just quake with a new coat of paint. I'm not sure if that's what the genre really needs.

inland raptor
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it needs to evolve else its just the same and no matter how much marketing or tricks u put into it

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u still wont turn new players into casual players of that game

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both diabotical and quake champions

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had a LOT of people try it out

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huge streamers tried both games

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dozens of thousands of people tried

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and after 6 months

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back to 1k players max

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i think if you ask most people in the afps community, they will probably tell you that the reason why quake doesnt succeed

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is lack of marketing or skins

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or more resources put into development

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or even that the whole world nowadays doesnt like hard games

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but that couldnt be farther from the truth

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there are insanely hard games out right now, a lot of them with a much higher skill ceiling then quake

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take fortnite as example, the game evolves every couple of months

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and if you were a top pro in the game and stop playing for a few months

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that's it, you have to retire

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you will never reach the top again

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because it always keeps getting pushed so hard

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the one thing arena fps has that other games dont is the vastly different arsenal of futuristic weapons that u have full access to in one fight

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ok ill stop ranting now

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its hard to stop once i start talking about afps

crisp tapir
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Nah it's ok. I think you've hit the nail on a lot of things. And the answers you've given are different and make a lot more sense than what I've heard otherwise.

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Never played much of Fortnite but I always found it impressive with how high the skill ceiling would actually go. Would you say it has the highest skill ceiling in the shooter market currently?

inland raptor
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currently i think its finally starting to die out due to terrible devs not wanting to pursue esports in a proper way but still yes

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i think arena fps have the highest skill floor out of any genre

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the skill ceiling in my opinion is defined by competition

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the more competitive a game is, the higher the players will push that ceiling