When arguably the most dominant Quake player of all time has to show up at the unemployment office, it is the right moment to ask yourself whether he will ever frag for a living again.
Deathmatch started and defined esports in Europe and North America for several years. It bred superstars like Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel and fed many mouths. It was and still is praised for being simple to understand but compelling to watch. It was so good that it was difficult to logically argue why it should not succeed.
Then life came around and wiped deathmatch off the face of professional gaming. UT2004 is dead. PainKiller and its $1,000,000 are dead. Quake 4 has just left us too, and Unreal Tournament 3 is coming. Do the gravestones of those three games mean that UT3 has no future? All of them were deathmatch games, after all, and they all collapsed.
And still, Matthieu Dallon, the ESWC president, argues that deathmatch is a very good platform for esports. Despite numbers from his own tournament telling him otherwise. I want to agree with him.
I think the reasons why deathmatch should be a success as an esport are still as valid as they always were. There is nothing wrong with the concept. It cannot be denied it is the common denominator of UT2004, PainKiller and Quake 4, but those are all separate cases. They just so happened to occur in succession.
It is true that the climate for difficult esports games may not be the most favorable with the spread of consoles, Counter-Strike and World of Walking. But the underlying reason can only be three words: a bad game. In one way or another.
See, it is not enough for any game to be understandable to a mass audience. It never was. At the end of the day, the audience will be the people that can relate to the game themselves. The Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament communities got too old, got bored, got a job or got a life or simply did not like the new games. The supply of players and spectators wore thin with every year and the fresh titles failed to replace the players and spectators that have left.
How many stars of today’s deathmatch scene come directly from UT2004, PainKiller or Quake 4? How many of them come from Quake 3 or older games? See my point?
The next big deathmatch game does not necessarily need a list of gameplay features as refined and as studied as those of the CPMA mod. It needs a vast army of newbies that bad games will never attract. Or bad games that will discourage the newbies by being an ass to set up for multiplayer.
The next big deathmatch game needs to sell big, be fun and engaging, and simple to get hooked into. UT3 will sell big and we will soon see what else it has to offer. PainKiller never sold big enough and didn’t have enough newbies. Quake 4 had a newbie-proof firewall installed out of the box and UT2004 had a decent shot, but fell short due to uninteresting gameplay.
Those games are dead. Deathmatch is not.
8 Comments
Deathmatch is not even close to dead, it has simply moved to a new medium, the console, because the stripped down gameplay encourages the “vast army of newbies” required for any sort of multiplayer to have longevity.
And just to add a prediction, DM will not come back through UT3.
i agree but from looking at the ut3 demo and the way epic staff treats its competitive players. UT3 beta demo has the same built in firewall that q4 had.. horrible server browser and complete lack of customizability from the most customizable ut ever… assuming that the most customizable ut = hey we can choose how are character looks. but heh if you want to change your mouse sensitivity or cross hair your sol.
I disagree, I think deathmatch is more of on a hiatus at this time. Sometimes players need breaks. Sometimes at first the game is engaging and then slowly dies off after a certain amount of elitism is at play. Quake 4 is still being played just not by the vast majority of people. UT2004 afaik is mainly TAM now. Quake 3 is harder to find a game in North America than it is in Quake 4 don’t get me wrong both are great games. UT3 is lack lusted in its game play. Its boring, uninteresting and this is not because im not a quake fanboy it simply is not ut99^2. Granted my opinion may change when I actually play the retail version. I simply think that death match is missing one game element that people have yet to put their hands on to make it that game that everyone wants to play. Now, if you take a look at every shooter game that is in existence today. It is all based off death-match and sure it has its modified rule sets or mods or weapons but in the end that is what its derived from. Even if “Pure FPS” dies…….we will all remember the roots of where fps gaming was…..and that was deathmatch
My take:
Marketing.
New gamers have been bred to believe that “realism”, “objective-based”, “squads”, and “vehicular” are the only words that matter when judging a game. This is what the gaming media tells them, this is what the mainstream media (be it through articles or advertisements) tells them. Until they are told otherwise, why SHOULD they know any better?
At some point BF/COD/CS will all merge into 1 game that takes parts from each formula… and then get released multiple times by different companies under different names. If COD 4 had more vehicular emphasis, step 1 would already be complete.
@ Concrete: Yeah, thats probably true.
I think it has a lot to do with which FPS a shooter-player “grows up” on, his first love if you can say so.
My first DM shooter was Duke 3D, which I still really love just for being that first experience of raw Deathmatch. At the moment i’m a Q3 Promode player, because I feel it is the closest to perfection in Deathmatch.
Obviously the generation who started out with the huge Counterstrike-Boom will want completely different things from the genre.
The actual problem is definitely related to the quality of the games but also to the way that the communities handle bugs and flaws in the ootb-versions.
The number of things that a new player had to download for UT2004 before he could actually enter a server that was set up for deathmatch “as played” with UTComp, maybe also TAM installed for some games, AntiTCC and/or Safegame too, several Bonuspacks and god knows what else was making people press F10 (abort) rather fast. If the redirect for downloads wasn’t active, it took about 20 to 40 minutes depending on your connection to get all the stuff needed IF and only IF you had the right patch installed which probably not all beginners would do…
With Quake4, downloads of the required packages weren’t even possible after the first few patches were released and it simply didn’t work to connect to any server that was running Q4Max for example, so you had to go browsing them on the web…
With Painkiller, the fact that you were one of a maximum of 50 players that were online at the same time, didn’t do much good, too.
If you want fresh blood in a game, it needs to be rather good out of the box and the community will have to accept that having too many mutators running to make the game be in their liking will drive new players away.
If you want to just play a game that you maybe watched on tv and that looked like fun, you want to play that game and this means you need to be able to get into it fast and easy and need to be able to do some random luckfrags in order to make you think that you could actually become a good player.
In UT2k4, the movement based upon dodging, dodgejumping, using the shieldgun etc. was the best reason to quit for new players after 5 minutes if they even took the difficulties to download all the stuff he needed to play online: Imagine… you’re walking straight lines and jumping now and then and all your opponents are flying through the map at a staggering speed, you can’t hit anything but get respawnraped every few seconds… not much fun in it.
Quake 4 and Painkiller weren’t that much different in means of complicated movement.
Unreal Tournament 3 has a good chance to become the next big thing in deathmatch because it has the balance that allows new players to do some random frags without being too noobish in it. The movement allows nice tricks things isn’t as artistic as the UT2k4 movement was and you’re not totally lost with running in a straight line and fire now and then.
The only question to me seems to be whether UT3 will manage to be both - a good game for new players and an addicting game for old players.
The first shooter that manages to be these two things will see the return of deathmatch and I’m in good hope for UT3 tbh.
Good article, Carmac, brought it very much to the point.
Quake 4 had a newbie-proof firewall installed out of the box”
So true I bought the game to play Multiplayer but it was so godamn fiddly to get it to work in the end I gave up and played single player for +- 20 minutes then put it bk in the box and i’ve not opened it since.
Quake3 was enjoyable, relatively easy to get into (aside from lack of ingame chat rooms). There are lots of good team-based FPS’ Team Fortress & Cod4 maybe its time people embrace them :D
all true, Carmac. I’m left with very little to say when I agree with everything and you’ve already said it all =[