5 Massive Games That Killed Skill-Based First Person Shooters
So much skill, so few games to use it in these days.
It’s no secret that today’s most popular games are a lot more user-friendly and a lot less rewarding for hardcore FPS gamers, but which game exactly is to blame for it? We’ve gathered up five of the top suspects for questioning, each with their own hand in today’s derp derp world of penta-kill air strikes and incapacitating weaponry.
[Suspect #1] Counter-Strike: Source
Who It Killed: Half-Life: Counter-Strike
How It Happened: For a long time Counter-Strike 1.6 looked like it just couldn’t die and lead all games played on steam on a regular basis by a huge margin, nearly a decade after its release. That is, until Counter-Strike: Source was released. The release of Source “killed” Counter-Strike in a lot of different ways, starting with the way it stole prize money away from 1.6 at many major tournament events.While there was little doubt that 1.6 was the superior game for competition, tournaments needed to attract hardware sponsors with pretty games, and that gave Source just one too many chances before the money ran fairly dry for the CS community.
Another big impact Source had on CS, was its inherent ability to split the community. If Source was named anything other than Counter-Strike, it wouldn’t have even dented the playerbase, but because it was billed as a part of the franchise, a lot of newer players that would typically join classic Counter-Strike opted for Source instead.
Fewer new players meant less and less people on public servers, and since competitive pros spent most of their gaming time in private scrims, matches and pugs, there was no medium to attract new entries into the community. Players would join 1.6, and then see a ghost town of servers with bots in them, not realizing there were tons of players playing in private 5v5 matches somewhere else.
While Source isn’t the most unskilled game you will ever play, it certainly widens the margin of error for players and lessens the skill-gap significantly compared to its 1.6 counterpart. Longer flashes, more random weapon spread, substantially larger hitboxes and trash-ridden map locations say it all. If you want to see a gaming franchise take a downward spiral in skill-requirement, here’s your prototypical example.
[Suspect #2] Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Who It Killed: Half-Life: Counter-Strike
How It Happened: The Call of Duty franchise has quickly become the best-selling FPS franchise of all time, and it looks like that’s a trend that isn’t stopping anytime soon. For games like Counter-Strike that were already struggling internally with its Source brethren, the extreme success of COD beginning with the Modern Warfare strain was the nail in the coffin.
Much like Counter-Strike: Source, you can’t make an argument that Call of Duty has no skill required at all. Certainly, as an FPS game you’re still rewarded for map awareness, map knowledge, problem-solving and of course quality aiming. However, you only have to play a game like the original Counter-Strike for a few weeks to get a grip on it and realize just how much control you are losing over your player in favor of more realism in games like COD.
I also do think it is fair to compare COD with Counter-Strike. While games like Battlefield are full-on war simulations, the COD franchise has always been arcadey-simulation, which is exactly what Counter-Strike is. COD leans a little more on the simulation side of things, and Counter-Strike leans a bit more on the arcade side.
It’s a shame that players these days are stuck playing games over and over again until they unlock newer and better weapons, and can never appreciate the subtle skill of the CS money system, of buy rounds, save rounds, of making smart decisions on whether or not to buy a defusal kit when you can’t afford head armor with it.
[Suspect #3] Quake 4
Who It Killed: Quake 3 (sort of)
How It Happened: It wouldn’t be 100% accurate to say Quake 4 killed Quake 3, especially since Quake Live is still around today. However, what Quake 4 did was let down the future of the series and stifled Quake 3′s ability to attract newer gamers that would one day become the skilled pros of tomorrow.
While games like Painkiller were pushed hard by tournaments as a competitive game and stole a lot of money for a while, it was the cannibalism and letdown factor of Quake 4 that may have been the dagger in the heart of Quake 3′s modern-day significance. Frankly, Quake 4 is a lot better effort than Counter-Strike: Source was, but it’s really hard to stand up and compete with a legendary game like Quake 3. You could make the case that Unreal Tournament 3 belongs here more than Q4, but the community badly needed Q4 to rejuvenate the 1v1 genre, and it didn’t live up to those standards.
There’s a big worry right now that the trend in gaming is going to continue toward team-based war simulations, and we might not see another “Quake 3″ type juggernaut in a long time. Even if one comes out, there’s little incentive for players to jump into a game that will so quickly punish them for their lack of skill and dedication. Sigh, back in my day we took our asswhoopin like men, and tried again. We didn’t die and say “this game sucks it doesn’t even have air strikes.”
[Suspect #4] Halo 2
Who It Killed: Halo: Combat Evolved
How It Happened: This is easily going to be the most confusing entry on this list, so try and bear with me. The original Halo had no online support on Xbox Live (without some sneaky modding), so it’s hard to say Halo 2 did anything but good for the franchise when it blew up the online arena and took over Major League Gaming. With that said, frankly Halo 2 is an inferior game from a skill-based FPS perspective.
With an all-new stupid regenerative shield and a useless starting weapon (changed for competitive games, I know), the entire game was based around weapon control. While that sounds like the basis for a good FPS game (think Quake), there simply wasn’t enough movement speed in Halo 2 to make weapon control anything more than a nuisance. On top of that, something about bursting an entire clip into someone’s head with a rifle and watching them not die, just makes me want to throw up a little in my mouth at the direction of FPS games these days.
Everyone remembers the pistol in the original Halo, and how much more it rewarded good aim and skill than silly one-hit weapons like the sword in Halo 2. While competitive games were certainly limited to the LAN scene, it was definitely a shame to see the Halo series put a helmet on and take players on the short-bus to success. Halo 2 took a series with so much promise to carry the flag of skill-based FPS on consoles, and hit it with the best NERF gun money could buy.
[Suspect #5] World of Warcraft
Who It Killed: Every good player in every major FPS.
How It Happened: For some reason, it seemed like every good player in every major FPS game got hooked on World of Warcraft at some point or another, despite the genre being seemingly unrelated. And to make matters worse, tournaments were actually starting to hand out money for the world’s largest new game that took money away from others.
It’s hard to boast the millions and millions of monthly users that WoW does without putting a dent on any online community, and trust me when I say for some reason, the skill-based FPS community suffered as much as anyone. Perhaps it’s because the FPS genre has always been centered around competitive tournaments and the LAN scene, that once WoW released it just spread like a virus from one person to the next. I’ve heard horror stories of players showing up to a LAN, and every single player is playing WoW.
With fewer players around to show their support for the hardcore FPS community, there’s little reason for developers to try to do anything but imitate what has made WoW so successful. Progressive weapon acquisitions and rewards for “grinding” have worked not only for COD, but also for World of Warcraft, and I can’t imagine that formula not being used for the most popular FPS games of the future.
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What about dota?
Dota 2 is gonna be css and dota is gonna be cs 1.6
LoL is CSS, DotA is CS.
Great article, I agree with most of your points. I was surprised to hear your spin on WoW, good read
While COD has been ruining competitive shooters for the last couple of years, I think that the halo series still did more to destroy shooters overall. Even COD seems like halo with better graphics to anyone who played CS and Q3A.
I have never had more fun playing a video game than I did in my counterstrike days. I started playing during beta 1 and immediately stopped caring about team fortress classic.
Q3A just might be the most perfect shooter ever made. I still fire up quake live from time to time.
I am also guilty of jumping on the WOW bandwagon numerous times. A large number of my military friends play it so we basically use it as an interactive version of skype.
Any Call of Duty or Battlefield.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare 2: Who It Killed: Half-Life: Counter-Strike
When?
nah, nvm I’ll take it back after reading the whole article… lol
A lot of this is true, but the argument that X game took prize money away from Y is flawed.
The prize money went away from older games because they were old, not because there was a new game. This will always be the case. Sponsors do not care about the actual game itself, just that it is newer and is more likely to result in people buying new products because it gains attention. If those older games were updated to require newer hardware, I’d be willing to bet more sponsors would care.
This is true.
Good point Sharat this definitely isn’t the first itnnasce of a flying mechanism in an FPS. Tribes’ spiritual successor, Fallen Empire: Legions (GarageGames browser based game on InstantAction) released in 2008 used a flying mechanic focused on horizontal propulsion instead of the vertical movement that the flying in Reach specializes in. So not only has this mechanic existed for a while, but it’s been put to use in several different ways. While I haven’t played Dark Void, both FE:L and Reach are very non-cover oriented games, so it does stand to reason that flying in something like Gears of War or Modern Warfare wouldn’t be a great fit. However, I’m sure they could still come up with an interesting way to fit new mechanics into their gameplay.
OLD games= more skilled
New games= dumbed down less skilled games
cry more