/vr/ - Retro Games

Part of the problem with "reviving" deathmatch is how tied it is with e-Sports. Arena games have become closely associated with duels and heavily controlled games. This is the total opposite of how it was played back then. FFA and CTF were THE big game modes, and people just played whatever they want. For every duel, there are 50 FFAs with people spamming rockets, grenades, willy nilly and 20 CTF games with people grappling around like idiots, all of these on maps that weren't "league friendly". If you were to let people actually play arena shooters like they actually were played back then instead of trying to heavily nudge them towards dueling because it's what the pros do, you'd probably get more people playing them.

There's also cultural shifts. Quake 1 and it's successors, such as Quake 2, UT99, and Half-Life 1, was developed and became popular in a time when its players shared the hacker's creed of being able to crack open a game and do whatever you want with it or host whatever instance of it because why not? Now, gamers want games where there's a heavy moderator presence, ques so you can instantly hop into the action, rankings to show off your e-peen, buying skins to let the world see how cool you look, and all content coming from and being controlled by the developers. All of this is antithetical to how arena shooters were developed, played, and grew.

Arena shooters were created in and for a specific cultural moment and groups that have been lost to time. You can't truly revive arena shooters unless you manage to de-link dueling from being the core of arena shooters and manage to somehow brainwash every gamer into thinking like mid to late 90s computer nerds that all believed in the hacker's creed in some way.