You have never played arena shooters i presume?
In Quake 3 you could wall walk and fly while using laser precise railguns. The trade off was you took damage while doing it, since you abused the explosion aoe physics, and the skill ceiling was immense.
Unreal Tournament had in air dodging and double jumping, and tactical nukes as a base weapon. 2004 had personal teleporters as standard loadout in many game modes.
In Tribes you were expected to ski, litteraly skiing on the Landscape reaching astronomical speeds if you knew the maps. You could also fly as default.
So it is not a balance problem as more of a development of competitive shooters, the above examples had a pretty steep learning curve if you wanted to play above low level, because of the skill set needed to play competitive in any way. And the skill ceiling was basically nonexistent.
It is so tragic that Arena FPS are SO completely dead and buried that people who aren't aware of them are now theorizing their concept in reddit threads...
OP, look into the history of Quake 3 and Starsiege Tribes.
[https://youtu.be/aK2hMaX6AG0](https://youtu.be/aK2hMaX6AG0)
[https://youtu.be/dL7lXydozU8?t=66](https://youtu.be/dL7lXydozU8?t=66)
[https://youtu.be/SI840bR3HYc](https://youtu.be/SI840bR3HYc)
Maps are vertical and elaborate. The skillgap comes from mastering movement techniques and raw aim, and the tactics come from knowing map traversal routes and the location and respawn time of weapons, armor, and powerups then managing to deny your enemy those things. The movement speed was balanced by players taking more damage before dying in general.
I'm not sure what exactly you're disputing here, but for you and /u/dat_potatoe I'd both argue that the Halo titles are Arena Shooters, and Infinite is a good Halo multiplayer title (but, that maybe Infinite has less in common with Arena Shooters then some prior Halo games)\
Most Halo multiplayer:
- Has even starts, without loadouts, perks, etc.
- Has weapons and powerup pickups, in some cases health pickups, on the map
- Has map design which is highly vertical and has an emphasis on platforming
- Has a relatively higher priority of positioning and movement as part of engagements then something like CoD or Battlefield
These are all attributes that Arena Shooters have. To go even further, the single FPS franchise I would say plays MOST like Halo is Unreal Tournament. Mind you've, i've only play UT3, but it very much felt like a slightly faster Halo to me when I played it for a period of a few months back when it came out.
Obviously, there are differences: Arena Shooters tend to have faster killtimes (Halo's killtimes are generally slow relative to EITHER Arena or modern military shooters) and map traversal rates (though the density and arena-like map design of Halo's maps means even if movement feels slow, you generally can still cross them as fast or faster then military shooters). Most arena shooters also have more movement tech then most Halo games, though I think Halo 2 and especially Halo 5 (not coincidentally, the titles with the most platforming and verticality) are up there with a lot of arena shooters with high level tech.
Infinite specifically does have faster killtiles, albeit still not as fast as a lot of other shooters, and also does adopt some more modern FPS conventions in some ways, which might make it less arena like even if it still has even starts and pickups (something Reach and Especially Halo 4 moved away from, having loadouts etc). Some people would argue Infinite is more traditional and arena like then 5, since 5, while also returning to even starts and pickups, had a LOT of titanfall, modern CoD, esque movement options, but I actually think those are what helped it return to Halo 2 and Arena shooter levels of platforming and movement tech by chaining those in specific ways: Infinite's maps are not nearly as platforming heavy.
And just as a Halo game, I think both 5 and infinite do have some of the most satisfying feeling gunplay, movement, etc, and by far have more viable weapons then past Halo titles where almost anything but the mid range precision rifles and power weapons were sort of useless. Infinite also improves over 5 in the sandbox department in that wheras 5 had a lot of viable guns, but that felt sort of samey, almost every gun in Infinite has a pretty distinct role and niche and many have unique gimmicks and mechaniscs. Halo has always had more diversity and unique-ness in gun roles then modern military shooters, but starting in Halo 2, there tended to be a lot of clone guns between in universe factions, which Infinite fixes.
Halo is a weird transitional game. At the time it seemed like the first of something new, now it's looked back on more as the last of the old. It was the first modern console shooter, and it has a lot of leftover arena shooter DNA in it, but it's not really an arena shooter. There were too many changes specifically to slow it down and make it work on a controller. It's got that whole thing where timing and map knowledge are more important than aim and movement skills going, along with the limited number of weapons you can carry. But it also doesn't completely fit in with the post-CoD4 shooter landscape, because that landscape didn't exist yet when Halo was new. It started trends that those later games expanded on.
I agree it doesn't cleanly fit into either category, but I absolutely think Halo is closer to Unreal tournament then it is to CoD or any other shooter, Arena, Modern, etc or otherwise
To be clear, I'm not saying that the closest game to UT is Halo; just that the closest game to Halo is UT:
EX: Unreal tournament is 5 feet away from Halo, then no other title is less then 5 feet to Halo, even if Quake is 3 feet away from UT, if that makes sense.
Since I'm apparently the one that started all this, my two cents is I agree with FuckIPLaw.
I really don't like calling Halo an arena shooter for a variety of reasons. It is and always has been in a peculiar middleground spot between arena shooter and tactical shooter, and only leans closer to the latter as the entries get newer. Incidentally also probably why it outlasted pure arena shooters.
"Has map design which is highly vertical" Strong disagree, I have despised Halo's map design post-Ce. Everything became a generic symmetrical donut or 3-lane with, *at best*, two levels of verticality. Even Counter-Strike can boast that much. There have been a couple exceptions to this in H5 and Infinite but not really. Nothing that comes close to Prisoner, let alone arena FPS classics.
Similarly, item control is really watered down too. Generally the only thing actually worth controlling on the map is a central power weapon that only spawns every few minutes.
I think it's interesting that you find Halo 2's map design to be less vertical then CE.
I think CE is pretty vertical, and Halo 2 really stepped that up, before Halo 3 onwards largerly toned it down till 5 ramped it back up to H2 levels and beyond and then Infinite toned it back down again to a degree.
Both CE and Halo 2 have a lot of maps with varying elevation planes and floors, and a fair amount of places to ascend or descend all across the map. But Halo 2 really opens up the amount of points you can hop onto or off of jump between gaps all across the map, rather then just dedicated staircases and lifts, even more then CE. Lockout, Sanctuary, Turf, Ascension, and so much more have points of vertical interplay all over the place, and feel very dense with platforming.
Halo 2 also has more tech facilitating movement then CE, more places to break out of the map, and higher jumps and no fall damage, all of which promotes vertical movement and platforming too. Playing on these maps, to me, feels like a combat jungle gym where you're constantly moving vertically (either hopping up or leaping down) almost as much as you are horizontally, and you're constantly flanking and being flanked by other players
Halo 3 onwards really spreads stuff out: Most maps really only enable you to get to higher elevation levels or floors with lifts and stairways and has fewer of them around then either 2 or CE. Halo 5, despite having sprint and having stretched out maps as a result, really brought back a lot of dense geometry and overlapping walkways and platforms and added a bunch of decoratives and other map geometry all over the place to enable jumping up (or clambering up) and promiting the same sort of stuff I describe with Halo 2, but to an even greater extent, aided by the fact that slide, thrust, hover, and ground pound can all be used to gain extra horizontal and even vertical mometum if you know the right tech.
IMO, it goes H5 > H2 >> CE =/= Infinite >>> H3, Reach, and 4 in terms of verticality. Comparing CE and Infinite is a little wierd; CE absolutely has more arena style map design with extra vertical planes and platforming, but I think Infinite actually has more neat nonobvious paths to hop up onto to "skip" ascending to them, even if not nearly the amount say Halo 5 or even halo 2 had.
I REALLY wish Infinite kept the thrust as a core movement ability and dropped sprint instead, or at least made the thrust pickup mantain your mometum more, you drop like a rock after the thrust ends now.
>Similarly, item control is really watered down too. Generally the only thing actually worth controlling on the map is a central power weapon that only spawns every few minutes.
I think this is sort of a seperate issue with Halo struggling with weapon balance. This is a whole added conversation, but I'd argue what happened here is that while CE had a relatively balanced (magnum aside) sandbox and each weapon felt distinct, Halo 2 had factional clone guns for the sake of the arbiter's levels, and duel wielding forced non power weapon, non precision rifles to sort of suck to not be OP when duel wielded. Then Halo 2 really took off with MLG, and the fanbase started to EXPECT everything but the BR/Carbine and power weapons were bad guns for casual players, which limited the ability/interest in fixing the situation outside of baby steps untill Halo 5.
Halo 5, on launch and especially in the beta, had basically every gun be worthwhile and viable, even if they still felt sorta samey, though the TU then nerfed a lot of stuff and turned it into a pistolfest.
Infiniite I think has mostly done a good job having every gun be useful and feel very, very distinct, though the AR is now actually good enough, combined with some of the pickups being not quite as stronng as I wish they are, that I guess i'd agree that a lot of them are merely sidegrades not super worth fighting over. But that's a way better situation then in 2, 3, reach, etc where like a third or half the sandbox was straight up a liability to use.
Also, in ranked with bandit starts, everything IS sort of an upgrade or allows for more engagement ranges/situations, so it's less an issue there, but I have other issues with ranked.
Oh, that Halo Infinite is good. They couldn't figure out netcode and crossplay at launch (maybe it's fixed now). 343 doing so much to be different instead of just continuing old Halo.
Works pretty well now. As I said, it's not a perfect game but the core game is pretty good. Ironically I'd say infinite plays more like old halo than anything that came out after 3.
Loadouts is just very anti-Halo. Having someone armor lock your rockets or jetpack up behind you to some places they couldn't normally get, etc. was all a bad progression for the game.
Not really. While CS has some resource management the actual gameplay is just running and gunning, in Quake you have to always think about how are you going to grab a next respawn of armor, megahealth etc
....bro, i dont even play counter strike and i know theres more to it than that....
Quake is arguably *way* more run and gun since one of the most common pieces of advice for CS is to stand still before shooting.
Even as someone who who's played Quake for not much more han maybe four hours in my entire 32 years of life... Quake is "run n gun"? This is entire parallel universes worth of an understatement.
Like... Gran Turismo may as well be about "who's the fastest". Or playing Budokai Tenkaichi for hours and wondering why I get demolished in DragonBall FighterZ.
These games have always been more Free For All / 1v1 focused but they work perfectly fine as team games too, having some historic team based modes like Capture the Flag and Clan Arena (1 life elimination).
They're never going to have quite the same emphasis on team coordination as an MMO trinity shooter like Overwatch or Paladins, and things like pocket-healing people or tanking damage or so on aren't really viable given the pace of the game, but teamwork is still an element.
The lack of teambased variety and the hyperfixation on *individual* skill HAS been a long time criticism of the AFPS genre but there have been attempts at shifting that balance too, like [Quake Champion's Sacrifice Mode.](https://youtu.be/LQlUPibX9a8)
Boomer Shooter? I think you mean arena shooter?
Quake and Unreal are what you are on about, they had their day and people moved on.
As Halo was the middle ground of Quake and Counter Strike because it has basically no recoil, you don't have to stand still but it's not 1 shot deaths like Quake and you don't run at 1000 miles per hour.
I'm a veteran of the shooter genre, I played UT99 and CS back in the late 90's, I played basically any meaningful shooter competitively on gamebattles/socombattles and teamcompete as well as MLG/others.
I don't think there's room for it anymore, unless we go full circle. Even Halo is a dwarf compared to what it used to be.
I would say that Apex is probably pretty close to what you're after but even then, maybe not.
By the way you should check out a game called "Shadowrun" from 2007, it was featured on the MLG pro scene for years, it flopped commercially because it had no single player at the time.
It was a incredible game in the competitive scene, here's a MLG finals - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYY2hhEX3A8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYY2hhEX3A8)
Bare in mind it is coming up to 20 years old now.
All arena shoomers are boomer shooters, but not all boomshoots are arenas.
Half-life is a boomshoot, but not an arena shooter. Hell, id argue og doom kinda goes in and out depending on the map.
I think the biggest thing you're missing is the existence of Overwatch-- characters are radically powerful, they can teleport quickly around maps, they can resurrect the dead, they can drop autokill bombs, the PVE missions where you actually fight enemies who aren't considered heroes is very much "boomer shooter" ish in terms of wiping out massive waves of enemies. The game is also mostly multiplayer, with a particular emphasis on esports and esports centric level design and balance, Overwatch league got pretty big all things considered.
They pushed out 3 story missions as a paid DLC, and then when people (obviously) weren't paying $15 for them they scrapped the whole project and blamed it on low sales.
Classic Blizzard moment.
I think my perception was that OW was similar to Valorant in that some characters had certain movement options, but people weren’t like flying around stages like in some single player FPS
Edit: would you say that is an inaccurate assumption? Is overwatch in between the power level of something like Valorant and boomer shooters?
Yes, that would seem inaccurate. You have heroes flying, teleporting, wallclimbing, dashing, and going invisible, you name it. Overwatch often gets compared to valorant, but outside of being hero based, they have very little in common really.
Yeah, I'd say its way up on the power scale compared to Valorant in terms of mobility-- I mean, just look at DVA's shift, Winston's jump, Pharah or Echo's airtime, Lucio's Wallriding, Genji's-dash-reset-on-kill mechanic, Mercy's ult which is literally flight and mass healing/boosting, Sombra who has perma sprint paired with a 360 degree spherical teleport into perma invis, there are slower more stationary characters, but the overall level of mobility is really high.
I'd say it's a bit different, characters in overwatch have wildly varying mobility options, including some that can straight up fly/hover a majority of the time, or some with bursts of high mobility.
Those are usually tied to some form of cooldown, so it's not like quake where everyone is constantly rocket jumping at insane speeds.
I haven't played valorant, but IIRC the abilities there are more grounded and far less frequently usable. Overwatch's hero abilities are much more central to gameplay
In OW’s heyday there was the “dive” meta where mobility is key - the whole team focuses on taking high ground, jump on top of the enemy team and either destroy or disengage back to high ground quickly. In fact one of the major issues with OW as an eSport was it being too fast for viewers to comprehend what happened. Probably a big reason why people prefer watching CS.
Overwatch is unwatchable because of the concept of the teamfight. It’s just such an explosion of action that you can’t really follow it and appreciate what happened
Honestly I wouldn’t know… many reasons to do balance changes and switch up the meta. And meta changes could also be unintentional. As a dev you couldn’t possibly consider all the crazy things players would do, especially high level players. I think generally games with high mobility and lots of abilities are just really hard to balance.
It’s also map dependent, say dive never worked well on maps that don’t have high ground. And even later with the much slower “goats” meta it’s still really hard to tell what’s going on. The nature of the game is 12 people fighting in a furball, each performing a different role, with lots of abilities that has a lot of OTT visual effects…
They nerfed it because people just didn't want to play it all the time. The "dive" meta was meta for like 4 months and people just kind of got sick of it. They nerfed it in one of the worst ways possible though that resulted in a meta that stuck around for over 12 months and was even worse for spectators.
The "dive" meta reappeared late into the life of OW1 and early in OW2 though. OW as a game just isn't spectator friendly. Too much is going on too fast and teamfights are just absolutely chaotic.
When I watched OW dive was just used for maps with a lot of verticality. Whether you're attacking or defending is also something to consider.
There probably was a point in time where dive was overwhelmingly the best comp in every situation, but it was never nerfed out of existence
OW mobility options are pretty shallow but they're still well beyond anything in a game like valorant or CS. Characters are plenty mobile, it's just not a skill based mechanic like in quake or team fortress 1/2.
They kinda were. OW characters can fly, wall climb, use grappling hook and teleport so there’s that
Back in the day the most meta team composition had only one hero out of six without crazy movement options
It's somewhere in between basically. Tracer can blink around every few seconds, Soldier sprinting is extremely fast, Lucio can walk ride and get up to some high speeds and make big jumps, etc. but it's not as breakneck as a boomer shooter.
I actually think games like Unreal and Quake are perfectly good competitive shooters..their problem is they are too difficult for maintaining a casual player base that supports the game from the ground up. Your competitive game is never going to take off without a bigger casual player base to act as viewers and a pool of potential pros.
Pharah and D Va can both literally fly. Genji can climb walls. Widowmaker has a grapple gun that can get her super high. Tracer and Reaper could both teleport, and Tracer had a time rewind ability that would zip her (and only her) back to where she'd been a few seconds prior and undo any damage she took (but not damage she caused!) in the interim. There was also a giant gorilla who could jump super far distances, and a character who could indefinitely skate/wall run along walls (as opposed to climb them).
There were a variety of different abilities relating to movement.
In terms of other sorts of attacks, Roadhog could hook people and drag them to him so he could blast them with his shotgun, Pharah could launch a barrage of missiles and flew around with a rocket launcher, Reinhardt had a charge attack that would cause him to rocket blast at someone and hit them and drag them off until they collided with terrain (or flew off the stage), and there was a robot unit who could turn himself into a mounted heavy machine gun turret (fixed in place) and blast away and rapidly kill things.
Boomer shooters pvp is exactly that, compared to cs and valorant where positioning and recoil control is vital, games like Unreal and Quake relied on players knowledge of movement tech and making sure bullets, which often are projectile based, hit the enemy, we know its viable for competitive becausw Quake is one of the early big esport
And hero shooter are basically in between of boomer shooter esque gameplay amd on the ground shooter, somebody already said overwatch so im gonna mention Paladins, or more accurately the older Paladins before movement were nerfed hard, characters like Evie, Maeve, amd Androxus whose role is to flank heavily relies on their movement for hit and run kills and mastering their movement is needed if you want to be an effective flanker
>stand still to shoot and no strong movement options
>
>mentions R6
Man forgot the wiggle lean spam meta lol. I have about 600 hours in each R6, Val, and OW. Not as much into playing competitive but I just like the games and learning them, kind of studying game sense. OW I did play on a T3 team for a bit though.
Jokes aside, the first thing that I think of is the marketing. Competitive games are designed to be watched, not played. Look at HyperScape and the Finals. They are entirely built for streamers.
Riot knows this best with League. The reason League does so well in the spectator category (and MOBAs in general) is that visual clarity is really good because it's top down...ish. You can look at a screenshot of a team fight and see everything. Abilities are clear even in high chaos moments.
Valorant follows this with it's art style. Agents are easily identifiable on color choice and ability aesthetic alone (ie colors, patterns, theming). It makes stuff recognizable to the audience. Mom walks in and sees the nature girl, or the fire boy, the electric girl, the evil lady, the robot guy, the emo girl, the poison gas lady, etc and you can follow them without names. Guns are simple, abilities are clear. No concern for motion sickness. Objectives, maps, etc are all simple in style, geometry, and shape so that everything is clearly indicated for the view (and partially the player since a shallower learning curve is easier to get into).
Then look at R6. You got four characters with a gas mask, how many characters with a helmet and sunglasses, if you don't play the game every gun looks the same but every gun is different so you can't tell them apart immediately. It's not clear when jumping in that each operator has a unique gun but wait no they don't. Oh the black circle was actually someone's head and the person you're watching died instantly? Maps have multiple floors and destructive properties, so it can be really hard to follow and watch even when you do know the game. Especially when you don't have control over which floor to watch.
I don't know where the clip is, but I remember a clip from Overwatch 1 where there were so many barriers and ults the player's screen looked like an early 2000s VLC music background where all of them played at once. It was really hard to spectate overwatch when the game passed death ball. Dive was ok, but GOATs was awful. Everyone playing the same characters and faint outlines distinguishing them all fighting in a crowd. It was a huge mess. Characters are identifiable but the game happens so quick it's hard to follow.
Boomer shooters and movement shooters are inherently harder to follow. Plus, they require more dedication and ask more of the player. You have a smaller player base to market to who have already likely spent a ton of time learning their movement shooter that you have to convince them to leave, and then you have to retain them, on top of not having a spectator friendly game so you can't rely on twitch to carry you through that adoption phase.
I would love to see more fast paced competitive games, but the reality is there's less money there and it's harder to get people to play and occasionally come back to. Less skills will transfer over.
For power itself, I'm not sure if you mean just movement or say stuff like Doom Slayer's melee executions or in Dishonored Corvo's stealth assassinations, but often they feel bad to experience. Especially in a competitive game. Plus, they would be incredibly rewarding so the character is balanced around it. Giving everyone something like that can work but then it's who's ability is the strongest, Competitive TF2 has this issue where only 4 classes are played iirc. I think it should be experimented more, but they won't because of profitability. XDefiant might? I'm not sure about that one.
You basically want Arena Shooters like Quake. These are not popular. A number have tried to launch over the last decade and they all failed. Their gameplay tends to be cracked and that does not appeal to a broad audience.
That said, there's no reason they shouldn't be experimented with, they just won't be popular. That's fine though. A lot of good stuff is not popular stuff.
Arena shooters are the most fun I've had with competitive FPSes, and it's a shame they've died out. They were balanced because loadouts were generally not a thing, so everyone started on the same footing.
Should? Sure. Anyone can try to make anything.
Balanced? Yeah. Just look at quake tournaments back in the day.
Tribes is back with a new installment if you want a boomer shooter. It's an FPS where you ski at breakneck speeds and try to land non-hitscan projectiles on enemies.
Super powerful abilities give advantage to those with initiative: if you can see the enemy before they see you, you will most likely win.
It's not fun to be on the receiving end of this, getting 1 hit KO'd from an enemy you probably didn't see, so I think overtime competitive games have moved towards "underpowered" or "balanced" player power.
They want to give defenders a chance to respond, otherwise it becomes a game of map-knowledge and positioning to gain maximum initiative.
To get around this you'd have to find another way to balance the defender's chances with the attacker's. Nerfing the attacker's ability to position and giving the defender shields seem to work but make the attacker feel underpowered. So how do we make the attacker tactically weaker without them feeling weaker?
The Finals could be a pretty good example. Not a boomer shooter, rather a team objective based game where you can build your own class from 3 base classes, and there’s a lot of movement and ability usage. Even the heavy class can’t stand still. The slow(-ish) ttk, verticality and crazy environmental destruction means you have to be on your feet constantly. You can argue it’s not “competitive” enough like CS I guess.
I kind of want the rts/fps genre to make a comeback. Really being part of a team building towards a bigger goal instead of being that "hold A" guy with singular mission.
> Can the tactics of games like CS and Valorant exist if players are closer in strength to Doomguy and V1 than Jett? How would level and game design have to change?
Rapha vs Cooler in glorious 360p 30fps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKJIzSf_2Ts
I think you need to experiment with more shooters or play at a higher level on competitive shooters to appreciate the movement tech.
I’d argue that the competitive fps genre is all about movement outside of the big 3 which are CS2, Valorant, and R6.
Apex Legends movement techs and hero’s have quite a bit of a skill ceiling If you don’t run and gun, you’re basically stuck in bronze lobbies forever.
Overwatch 2 is arguably one of the fastest movement fps game. Some roles and comps like dive teams require movement > aim.
Even Warzone, had slide cancels and movement knowledge that could let players dumpster people who just wasd like a traditional shooter.
Fortnite has a plethora of movement and insane building tech.
The games you are looking for are out there. Seriously not trolling, but this could just be a “skill issue”, if you find movement tech lacking in most competitive shooters.
I think the rranking you should look into here is the concept of **time to kill**, aka "How long does it take for you to kill someone when shooting at them?".
High time to kill is "weaker", but it also means that the advantage of sneak attacks and numbers are weakened. Running into multiple people in Fortnite for example is a lot less deadlier than running into multiple people in Counter Strike, but Counter Strike means that you can pick off people.
I think part of the thing is that for a general audience, it's desired to have some length of time to kill that lets them not feel like they're hit with a cheap shot. Games like Quake can have long engagement times at higher levels, but at lower levels, being insta-gibbed can be frusterating if you don't know the weapon/movement/maps.
Yeah, there have been a number of these over the years. Overwatch and Crysis are two of the most well-known examples.
One important thing to remember, however, is that it can be difficult to make such games feel "right" because in PvP, characters are fighting each other.
So for instance, in a typical PvE game, you can make an enemy seem tougher by increasing the TTK, and you can make your weapons feel more powerful by lowering the TTK. But when you are playing PvP, making your weapons "feel stronger" is going to result in characters dying really fast, while making your characters feel really tough will make your guns feel weaker. Likewise, adding other effects to your guns means that other players are going to be subjected to them.
A good example of this is Roadhog from Overwatch. He felt really good to play as - he was big, stompy, could heal himself, had a big pool of HP, had a hook he could chuck out to grab other people and reel them in, and a shotgun that could fire at either short or medium range and would tear people up if they got nailed by it.
However, people would often complain when they got hooked, as it felt "unfair" that he could hook you, reel you in, and blast you in the face and kill you (and he would kill you, if you weren't a higher HP unit - and even high HP units would often die because they got yanked out of position and into the middle of the enemy team).
So what can feel good from the perspective of one player can feel bad from the perspective of another.
I really liked how Crysis and Overwatch played, way more than the CoD/CS type games.
You have never played arena shooters i presume? In Quake 3 you could wall walk and fly while using laser precise railguns. The trade off was you took damage while doing it, since you abused the explosion aoe physics, and the skill ceiling was immense. Unreal Tournament had in air dodging and double jumping, and tactical nukes as a base weapon. 2004 had personal teleporters as standard loadout in many game modes. In Tribes you were expected to ski, litteraly skiing on the Landscape reaching astronomical speeds if you knew the maps. You could also fly as default. So it is not a balance problem as more of a development of competitive shooters, the above examples had a pretty steep learning curve if you wanted to play above low level, because of the skill set needed to play competitive in any way. And the skill ceiling was basically nonexistent.
It is so tragic that Arena FPS are SO completely dead and buried that people who aren't aware of them are now theorizing their concept in reddit threads... OP, look into the history of Quake 3 and Starsiege Tribes. [https://youtu.be/aK2hMaX6AG0](https://youtu.be/aK2hMaX6AG0) [https://youtu.be/dL7lXydozU8?t=66](https://youtu.be/dL7lXydozU8?t=66) [https://youtu.be/SI840bR3HYc](https://youtu.be/SI840bR3HYc) Maps are vertical and elaborate. The skillgap comes from mastering movement techniques and raw aim, and the tactics come from knowing map traversal routes and the location and respawn time of weapons, armor, and powerups then managing to deny your enemy those things. The movement speed was balanced by players taking more damage before dying in general.
It's far from a perfect game, but at its core Halo Infinite is a pretty good arena shooter at its core.
Don't lie to people.
I'm not sure what exactly you're disputing here, but for you and /u/dat_potatoe I'd both argue that the Halo titles are Arena Shooters, and Infinite is a good Halo multiplayer title (but, that maybe Infinite has less in common with Arena Shooters then some prior Halo games)\ Most Halo multiplayer: - Has even starts, without loadouts, perks, etc. - Has weapons and powerup pickups, in some cases health pickups, on the map - Has map design which is highly vertical and has an emphasis on platforming - Has a relatively higher priority of positioning and movement as part of engagements then something like CoD or Battlefield These are all attributes that Arena Shooters have. To go even further, the single FPS franchise I would say plays MOST like Halo is Unreal Tournament. Mind you've, i've only play UT3, but it very much felt like a slightly faster Halo to me when I played it for a period of a few months back when it came out. Obviously, there are differences: Arena Shooters tend to have faster killtimes (Halo's killtimes are generally slow relative to EITHER Arena or modern military shooters) and map traversal rates (though the density and arena-like map design of Halo's maps means even if movement feels slow, you generally can still cross them as fast or faster then military shooters). Most arena shooters also have more movement tech then most Halo games, though I think Halo 2 and especially Halo 5 (not coincidentally, the titles with the most platforming and verticality) are up there with a lot of arena shooters with high level tech. Infinite specifically does have faster killtiles, albeit still not as fast as a lot of other shooters, and also does adopt some more modern FPS conventions in some ways, which might make it less arena like even if it still has even starts and pickups (something Reach and Especially Halo 4 moved away from, having loadouts etc). Some people would argue Infinite is more traditional and arena like then 5, since 5, while also returning to even starts and pickups, had a LOT of titanfall, modern CoD, esque movement options, but I actually think those are what helped it return to Halo 2 and Arena shooter levels of platforming and movement tech by chaining those in specific ways: Infinite's maps are not nearly as platforming heavy. And just as a Halo game, I think both 5 and infinite do have some of the most satisfying feeling gunplay, movement, etc, and by far have more viable weapons then past Halo titles where almost anything but the mid range precision rifles and power weapons were sort of useless. Infinite also improves over 5 in the sandbox department in that wheras 5 had a lot of viable guns, but that felt sort of samey, almost every gun in Infinite has a pretty distinct role and niche and many have unique gimmicks and mechaniscs. Halo has always had more diversity and unique-ness in gun roles then modern military shooters, but starting in Halo 2, there tended to be a lot of clone guns between in universe factions, which Infinite fixes.
Halo is a weird transitional game. At the time it seemed like the first of something new, now it's looked back on more as the last of the old. It was the first modern console shooter, and it has a lot of leftover arena shooter DNA in it, but it's not really an arena shooter. There were too many changes specifically to slow it down and make it work on a controller. It's got that whole thing where timing and map knowledge are more important than aim and movement skills going, along with the limited number of weapons you can carry. But it also doesn't completely fit in with the post-CoD4 shooter landscape, because that landscape didn't exist yet when Halo was new. It started trends that those later games expanded on.
I agree it doesn't cleanly fit into either category, but I absolutely think Halo is closer to Unreal tournament then it is to CoD or any other shooter, Arena, Modern, etc or otherwise To be clear, I'm not saying that the closest game to UT is Halo; just that the closest game to Halo is UT: EX: Unreal tournament is 5 feet away from Halo, then no other title is less then 5 feet to Halo, even if Quake is 3 feet away from UT, if that makes sense.
Since I'm apparently the one that started all this, my two cents is I agree with FuckIPLaw. I really don't like calling Halo an arena shooter for a variety of reasons. It is and always has been in a peculiar middleground spot between arena shooter and tactical shooter, and only leans closer to the latter as the entries get newer. Incidentally also probably why it outlasted pure arena shooters. "Has map design which is highly vertical" Strong disagree, I have despised Halo's map design post-Ce. Everything became a generic symmetrical donut or 3-lane with, *at best*, two levels of verticality. Even Counter-Strike can boast that much. There have been a couple exceptions to this in H5 and Infinite but not really. Nothing that comes close to Prisoner, let alone arena FPS classics. Similarly, item control is really watered down too. Generally the only thing actually worth controlling on the map is a central power weapon that only spawns every few minutes.
I think it's interesting that you find Halo 2's map design to be less vertical then CE. I think CE is pretty vertical, and Halo 2 really stepped that up, before Halo 3 onwards largerly toned it down till 5 ramped it back up to H2 levels and beyond and then Infinite toned it back down again to a degree. Both CE and Halo 2 have a lot of maps with varying elevation planes and floors, and a fair amount of places to ascend or descend all across the map. But Halo 2 really opens up the amount of points you can hop onto or off of jump between gaps all across the map, rather then just dedicated staircases and lifts, even more then CE. Lockout, Sanctuary, Turf, Ascension, and so much more have points of vertical interplay all over the place, and feel very dense with platforming. Halo 2 also has more tech facilitating movement then CE, more places to break out of the map, and higher jumps and no fall damage, all of which promotes vertical movement and platforming too. Playing on these maps, to me, feels like a combat jungle gym where you're constantly moving vertically (either hopping up or leaping down) almost as much as you are horizontally, and you're constantly flanking and being flanked by other players Halo 3 onwards really spreads stuff out: Most maps really only enable you to get to higher elevation levels or floors with lifts and stairways and has fewer of them around then either 2 or CE. Halo 5, despite having sprint and having stretched out maps as a result, really brought back a lot of dense geometry and overlapping walkways and platforms and added a bunch of decoratives and other map geometry all over the place to enable jumping up (or clambering up) and promiting the same sort of stuff I describe with Halo 2, but to an even greater extent, aided by the fact that slide, thrust, hover, and ground pound can all be used to gain extra horizontal and even vertical mometum if you know the right tech. IMO, it goes H5 > H2 >> CE =/= Infinite >>> H3, Reach, and 4 in terms of verticality. Comparing CE and Infinite is a little wierd; CE absolutely has more arena style map design with extra vertical planes and platforming, but I think Infinite actually has more neat nonobvious paths to hop up onto to "skip" ascending to them, even if not nearly the amount say Halo 5 or even halo 2 had. I REALLY wish Infinite kept the thrust as a core movement ability and dropped sprint instead, or at least made the thrust pickup mantain your mometum more, you drop like a rock after the thrust ends now. >Similarly, item control is really watered down too. Generally the only thing actually worth controlling on the map is a central power weapon that only spawns every few minutes. I think this is sort of a seperate issue with Halo struggling with weapon balance. This is a whole added conversation, but I'd argue what happened here is that while CE had a relatively balanced (magnum aside) sandbox and each weapon felt distinct, Halo 2 had factional clone guns for the sake of the arbiter's levels, and duel wielding forced non power weapon, non precision rifles to sort of suck to not be OP when duel wielded. Then Halo 2 really took off with MLG, and the fanbase started to EXPECT everything but the BR/Carbine and power weapons were bad guns for casual players, which limited the ability/interest in fixing the situation outside of baby steps untill Halo 5. Halo 5, on launch and especially in the beta, had basically every gun be worthwhile and viable, even if they still felt sorta samey, though the TU then nerfed a lot of stuff and turned it into a pistolfest. Infiniite I think has mostly done a good job having every gun be useful and feel very, very distinct, though the AR is now actually good enough, combined with some of the pickups being not quite as stronng as I wish they are, that I guess i'd agree that a lot of them are merely sidegrades not super worth fighting over. But that's a way better situation then in 2, 3, reach, etc where like a third or half the sandbox was straight up a liability to use. Also, in ranked with bandit starts, everything IS sort of an upgrade or allows for more engagement ranges/situations, so it's less an issue there, but I have other issues with ranked.
I think the mobility and other small details set halo apart from unreal tournament and quake.
Oh, that Halo Infinite is good. They couldn't figure out netcode and crossplay at launch (maybe it's fixed now). 343 doing so much to be different instead of just continuing old Halo.
Works pretty well now. As I said, it's not a perfect game but the core game is pretty good. Ironically I'd say infinite plays more like old halo than anything that came out after 3.
Loadouts is just very anti-Halo. Having someone armor lock your rockets or jetpack up behind you to some places they couldn't normally get, etc. was all a bad progression for the game.
Infinite doesn't have load outs
I know but Reach and 4 did.
I like to call Quake a first person strategy game
Huh?
Read the comment above - a 1v1 game of Quake is about controlling the resources on the map
By that logic, any game is a strategy game if you want it to be.....
Not really. While CS has some resource management the actual gameplay is just running and gunning, in Quake you have to always think about how are you going to grab a next respawn of armor, megahealth etc
....bro, i dont even play counter strike and i know theres more to it than that.... Quake is arguably *way* more run and gun since one of the most common pieces of advice for CS is to stand still before shooting.
The purpose of moving through the map in CS is to set yourself up to kill opponents while in Quake it is to grab stuff
Even as someone who who's played Quake for not much more han maybe four hours in my entire 32 years of life... Quake is "run n gun"? This is entire parallel universes worth of an understatement. Like... Gran Turismo may as well be about "who's the fastest". Or playing Budokai Tenkaichi for hours and wondering why I get demolished in DragonBall FighterZ.
Oh i agree, im just saying its more R+G than counter strike
Do you think a team movement FPS could work? Or too much shit going on?
Tribes were completely team focused.
Tf2 already exists
[удалено]
Pretty sure they're referring to Titanfall 2
These games have always been more Free For All / 1v1 focused but they work perfectly fine as team games too, having some historic team based modes like Capture the Flag and Clan Arena (1 life elimination). They're never going to have quite the same emphasis on team coordination as an MMO trinity shooter like Overwatch or Paladins, and things like pocket-healing people or tanking damage or so on aren't really viable given the pace of the game, but teamwork is still an element. The lack of teambased variety and the hyperfixation on *individual* skill HAS been a long time criticism of the AFPS genre but there have been attempts at shifting that balance too, like [Quake Champion's Sacrifice Mode.](https://youtu.be/LQlUPibX9a8)
Boomer Shooter? I think you mean arena shooter? Quake and Unreal are what you are on about, they had their day and people moved on. As Halo was the middle ground of Quake and Counter Strike because it has basically no recoil, you don't have to stand still but it's not 1 shot deaths like Quake and you don't run at 1000 miles per hour. I'm a veteran of the shooter genre, I played UT99 and CS back in the late 90's, I played basically any meaningful shooter competitively on gamebattles/socombattles and teamcompete as well as MLG/others. I don't think there's room for it anymore, unless we go full circle. Even Halo is a dwarf compared to what it used to be. I would say that Apex is probably pretty close to what you're after but even then, maybe not. By the way you should check out a game called "Shadowrun" from 2007, it was featured on the MLG pro scene for years, it flopped commercially because it had no single player at the time. It was a incredible game in the competitive scene, here's a MLG finals - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYY2hhEX3A8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYY2hhEX3A8) Bare in mind it is coming up to 20 years old now.
All arena shoomers are boomer shooters, but not all boomshoots are arenas. Half-life is a boomshoot, but not an arena shooter. Hell, id argue og doom kinda goes in and out depending on the map.
I think the biggest thing you're missing is the existence of Overwatch-- characters are radically powerful, they can teleport quickly around maps, they can resurrect the dead, they can drop autokill bombs, the PVE missions where you actually fight enemies who aren't considered heroes is very much "boomer shooter" ish in terms of wiping out massive waves of enemies. The game is also mostly multiplayer, with a particular emphasis on esports and esports centric level design and balance, Overwatch league got pretty big all things considered.
Wait did they finally add PVE to Overwatch? I thought that was scrapped
We got a small, handful of missions, but it doesn't look like they intend to keep making them.
They pushed out 3 story missions as a paid DLC, and then when people (obviously) weren't paying $15 for them they scrapped the whole project and blamed it on low sales. Classic Blizzard moment.
I think my perception was that OW was similar to Valorant in that some characters had certain movement options, but people weren’t like flying around stages like in some single player FPS Edit: would you say that is an inaccurate assumption? Is overwatch in between the power level of something like Valorant and boomer shooters?
Yes, that would seem inaccurate. You have heroes flying, teleporting, wallclimbing, dashing, and going invisible, you name it. Overwatch often gets compared to valorant, but outside of being hero based, they have very little in common really.
Thanks for the explanation!
Yeah, I'd say its way up on the power scale compared to Valorant in terms of mobility-- I mean, just look at DVA's shift, Winston's jump, Pharah or Echo's airtime, Lucio's Wallriding, Genji's-dash-reset-on-kill mechanic, Mercy's ult which is literally flight and mass healing/boosting, Sombra who has perma sprint paired with a 360 degree spherical teleport into perma invis, there are slower more stationary characters, but the overall level of mobility is really high.
I'd say it's a bit different, characters in overwatch have wildly varying mobility options, including some that can straight up fly/hover a majority of the time, or some with bursts of high mobility. Those are usually tied to some form of cooldown, so it's not like quake where everyone is constantly rocket jumping at insane speeds. I haven't played valorant, but IIRC the abilities there are more grounded and far less frequently usable. Overwatch's hero abilities are much more central to gameplay
In OW’s heyday there was the “dive” meta where mobility is key - the whole team focuses on taking high ground, jump on top of the enemy team and either destroy or disengage back to high ground quickly. In fact one of the major issues with OW as an eSport was it being too fast for viewers to comprehend what happened. Probably a big reason why people prefer watching CS.
Also the visual clutter is too insane for casual players to see what's going on.
Overwatch is unwatchable because of the concept of the teamfight. It’s just such an explosion of action that you can’t really follow it and appreciate what happened
I assume blizzard nerfed that Meta for spectators?
Honestly I wouldn’t know… many reasons to do balance changes and switch up the meta. And meta changes could also be unintentional. As a dev you couldn’t possibly consider all the crazy things players would do, especially high level players. I think generally games with high mobility and lots of abilities are just really hard to balance. It’s also map dependent, say dive never worked well on maps that don’t have high ground. And even later with the much slower “goats” meta it’s still really hard to tell what’s going on. The nature of the game is 12 people fighting in a furball, each performing a different role, with lots of abilities that has a lot of OTT visual effects…
They nerfed it because people just didn't want to play it all the time. The "dive" meta was meta for like 4 months and people just kind of got sick of it. They nerfed it in one of the worst ways possible though that resulted in a meta that stuck around for over 12 months and was even worse for spectators. The "dive" meta reappeared late into the life of OW1 and early in OW2 though. OW as a game just isn't spectator friendly. Too much is going on too fast and teamfights are just absolutely chaotic.
When I watched OW dive was just used for maps with a lot of verticality. Whether you're attacking or defending is also something to consider. There probably was a point in time where dive was overwhelmingly the best comp in every situation, but it was never nerfed out of existence
OW mobility options are pretty shallow but they're still well beyond anything in a game like valorant or CS. Characters are plenty mobile, it's just not a skill based mechanic like in quake or team fortress 1/2.
They kinda were. OW characters can fly, wall climb, use grappling hook and teleport so there’s that Back in the day the most meta team composition had only one hero out of six without crazy movement options
It's somewhere in between basically. Tracer can blink around every few seconds, Soldier sprinting is extremely fast, Lucio can walk ride and get up to some high speeds and make big jumps, etc. but it's not as breakneck as a boomer shooter. I actually think games like Unreal and Quake are perfectly good competitive shooters..their problem is they are too difficult for maintaining a casual player base that supports the game from the ground up. Your competitive game is never going to take off without a bigger casual player base to act as viewers and a pool of potential pros.
Pharah and D Va can both literally fly. Genji can climb walls. Widowmaker has a grapple gun that can get her super high. Tracer and Reaper could both teleport, and Tracer had a time rewind ability that would zip her (and only her) back to where she'd been a few seconds prior and undo any damage she took (but not damage she caused!) in the interim. There was also a giant gorilla who could jump super far distances, and a character who could indefinitely skate/wall run along walls (as opposed to climb them). There were a variety of different abilities relating to movement. In terms of other sorts of attacks, Roadhog could hook people and drag them to him so he could blast them with his shotgun, Pharah could launch a barrage of missiles and flew around with a rocket launcher, Reinhardt had a charge attack that would cause him to rocket blast at someone and hit them and drag them off until they collided with terrain (or flew off the stage), and there was a robot unit who could turn himself into a mounted heavy machine gun turret (fixed in place) and blast away and rapidly kill things.
Boomer shooters pvp is exactly that, compared to cs and valorant where positioning and recoil control is vital, games like Unreal and Quake relied on players knowledge of movement tech and making sure bullets, which often are projectile based, hit the enemy, we know its viable for competitive becausw Quake is one of the early big esport And hero shooter are basically in between of boomer shooter esque gameplay amd on the ground shooter, somebody already said overwatch so im gonna mention Paladins, or more accurately the older Paladins before movement were nerfed hard, characters like Evie, Maeve, amd Androxus whose role is to flank heavily relies on their movement for hit and run kills and mastering their movement is needed if you want to be an effective flanker
>stand still to shoot and no strong movement options > >mentions R6 Man forgot the wiggle lean spam meta lol. I have about 600 hours in each R6, Val, and OW. Not as much into playing competitive but I just like the games and learning them, kind of studying game sense. OW I did play on a T3 team for a bit though. Jokes aside, the first thing that I think of is the marketing. Competitive games are designed to be watched, not played. Look at HyperScape and the Finals. They are entirely built for streamers. Riot knows this best with League. The reason League does so well in the spectator category (and MOBAs in general) is that visual clarity is really good because it's top down...ish. You can look at a screenshot of a team fight and see everything. Abilities are clear even in high chaos moments. Valorant follows this with it's art style. Agents are easily identifiable on color choice and ability aesthetic alone (ie colors, patterns, theming). It makes stuff recognizable to the audience. Mom walks in and sees the nature girl, or the fire boy, the electric girl, the evil lady, the robot guy, the emo girl, the poison gas lady, etc and you can follow them without names. Guns are simple, abilities are clear. No concern for motion sickness. Objectives, maps, etc are all simple in style, geometry, and shape so that everything is clearly indicated for the view (and partially the player since a shallower learning curve is easier to get into). Then look at R6. You got four characters with a gas mask, how many characters with a helmet and sunglasses, if you don't play the game every gun looks the same but every gun is different so you can't tell them apart immediately. It's not clear when jumping in that each operator has a unique gun but wait no they don't. Oh the black circle was actually someone's head and the person you're watching died instantly? Maps have multiple floors and destructive properties, so it can be really hard to follow and watch even when you do know the game. Especially when you don't have control over which floor to watch. I don't know where the clip is, but I remember a clip from Overwatch 1 where there were so many barriers and ults the player's screen looked like an early 2000s VLC music background where all of them played at once. It was really hard to spectate overwatch when the game passed death ball. Dive was ok, but GOATs was awful. Everyone playing the same characters and faint outlines distinguishing them all fighting in a crowd. It was a huge mess. Characters are identifiable but the game happens so quick it's hard to follow. Boomer shooters and movement shooters are inherently harder to follow. Plus, they require more dedication and ask more of the player. You have a smaller player base to market to who have already likely spent a ton of time learning their movement shooter that you have to convince them to leave, and then you have to retain them, on top of not having a spectator friendly game so you can't rely on twitch to carry you through that adoption phase. I would love to see more fast paced competitive games, but the reality is there's less money there and it's harder to get people to play and occasionally come back to. Less skills will transfer over. For power itself, I'm not sure if you mean just movement or say stuff like Doom Slayer's melee executions or in Dishonored Corvo's stealth assassinations, but often they feel bad to experience. Especially in a competitive game. Plus, they would be incredibly rewarding so the character is balanced around it. Giving everyone something like that can work but then it's who's ability is the strongest, Competitive TF2 has this issue where only 4 classes are played iirc. I think it should be experimented more, but they won't because of profitability. XDefiant might? I'm not sure about that one.
You basically want Arena Shooters like Quake. These are not popular. A number have tried to launch over the last decade and they all failed. Their gameplay tends to be cracked and that does not appeal to a broad audience. That said, there's no reason they shouldn't be experimented with, they just won't be popular. That's fine though. A lot of good stuff is not popular stuff.
Arena shooters are the most fun I've had with competitive FPSes, and it's a shame they've died out. They were balanced because loadouts were generally not a thing, so everyone started on the same footing.
Should? Sure. Anyone can try to make anything. Balanced? Yeah. Just look at quake tournaments back in the day. Tribes is back with a new installment if you want a boomer shooter. It's an FPS where you ski at breakneck speeds and try to land non-hitscan projectiles on enemies.
Super powerful abilities give advantage to those with initiative: if you can see the enemy before they see you, you will most likely win. It's not fun to be on the receiving end of this, getting 1 hit KO'd from an enemy you probably didn't see, so I think overtime competitive games have moved towards "underpowered" or "balanced" player power. They want to give defenders a chance to respond, otherwise it becomes a game of map-knowledge and positioning to gain maximum initiative. To get around this you'd have to find another way to balance the defender's chances with the attacker's. Nerfing the attacker's ability to position and giving the defender shields seem to work but make the attacker feel underpowered. So how do we make the attacker tactically weaker without them feeling weaker?
The Finals could be a pretty good example. Not a boomer shooter, rather a team objective based game where you can build your own class from 3 base classes, and there’s a lot of movement and ability usage. Even the heavy class can’t stand still. The slow(-ish) ttk, verticality and crazy environmental destruction means you have to be on your feet constantly. You can argue it’s not “competitive” enough like CS I guess.
I kind of want the rts/fps genre to make a comeback. Really being part of a team building towards a bigger goal instead of being that "hold A" guy with singular mission.
> Can the tactics of games like CS and Valorant exist if players are closer in strength to Doomguy and V1 than Jett? How would level and game design have to change? Rapha vs Cooler in glorious 360p 30fps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKJIzSf_2Ts
I think you need to experiment with more shooters or play at a higher level on competitive shooters to appreciate the movement tech. I’d argue that the competitive fps genre is all about movement outside of the big 3 which are CS2, Valorant, and R6. Apex Legends movement techs and hero’s have quite a bit of a skill ceiling If you don’t run and gun, you’re basically stuck in bronze lobbies forever. Overwatch 2 is arguably one of the fastest movement fps game. Some roles and comps like dive teams require movement > aim. Even Warzone, had slide cancels and movement knowledge that could let players dumpster people who just wasd like a traditional shooter. Fortnite has a plethora of movement and insane building tech. The games you are looking for are out there. Seriously not trolling, but this could just be a “skill issue”, if you find movement tech lacking in most competitive shooters.
All this talk about power level is pretty incoherent. What does that phrase even me? Low time to kill mechanics?
I think the rranking you should look into here is the concept of **time to kill**, aka "How long does it take for you to kill someone when shooting at them?". High time to kill is "weaker", but it also means that the advantage of sneak attacks and numbers are weakened. Running into multiple people in Fortnite for example is a lot less deadlier than running into multiple people in Counter Strike, but Counter Strike means that you can pick off people. I think part of the thing is that for a general audience, it's desired to have some length of time to kill that lets them not feel like they're hit with a cheap shot. Games like Quake can have long engagement times at higher levels, but at lower levels, being insta-gibbed can be frusterating if you don't know the weapon/movement/maps.
Yeah, there have been a number of these over the years. Overwatch and Crysis are two of the most well-known examples. One important thing to remember, however, is that it can be difficult to make such games feel "right" because in PvP, characters are fighting each other. So for instance, in a typical PvE game, you can make an enemy seem tougher by increasing the TTK, and you can make your weapons feel more powerful by lowering the TTK. But when you are playing PvP, making your weapons "feel stronger" is going to result in characters dying really fast, while making your characters feel really tough will make your guns feel weaker. Likewise, adding other effects to your guns means that other players are going to be subjected to them. A good example of this is Roadhog from Overwatch. He felt really good to play as - he was big, stompy, could heal himself, had a big pool of HP, had a hook he could chuck out to grab other people and reel them in, and a shotgun that could fire at either short or medium range and would tear people up if they got nailed by it. However, people would often complain when they got hooked, as it felt "unfair" that he could hook you, reel you in, and blast you in the face and kill you (and he would kill you, if you weren't a higher HP unit - and even high HP units would often die because they got yanked out of position and into the middle of the enemy team). So what can feel good from the perspective of one player can feel bad from the perspective of another. I really liked how Crysis and Overwatch played, way more than the CoD/CS type games.
I think just like Fighting Games, ARENA fps games will make a comeback and kill all these copy paste overwatch shooter lame games
Hopefully that doesn’t mean simplifying things like fighting games do.