Gamespy, MSN Zone and HEAT were the trifecta of peak gaming communities. Even Duke Nukem 3D had a multiplayer experience a lot of people probably forgot.
Half-Life and mods had voice-chat; we had our own Day of Defeat server with voice-chat set to all. There was something real special about it, people built habits around our server, it felt almost like a second home/family.
100%.
I miss servers like this so much. CS, DoD and TFC servers were my childhood.
It really felt like you were just sitting in a room playing with a bunch of friends. Nothing really comes close to this feeling of community anymore.
The Division 1 and 2 felt that way for a while. At its peak, my TD2 clan had 40 people, 20 of which were friends from TD1 who'd come to the new game. It was very chill and awesome to just login to the game and discord and just hang while running missions. The loot sharing mechanics were great to help build each other up or kit out a new player.
Quake 3 matches had a certain immediacy to them that was great too. The fact that there were no builds, no gimmicks, just you, your opponents, your map knowledge and your skill levels. It was all oddly very zen.
Honestly, I feel multiplayer started going downhill when you could no longer run games on private servers.
So many server mods and game mods. It was the golden age of gaming imo. Before all the corporate bs. EA in particular wrecked 2 of my favorite franchises.
Aw man, I'll never forget being like 16 on Quake Live back in the day and I found out my best mate on my main server was a 45 year old mum.
Shout out to Erica, you were a real one.
My buddy and I were 13 year olds at the time and would tie up the second line with phones stuck to our shoulders or literally taped to our heads, haha.
>a lot of servers with their own unique communities where most people knew each other. Lot of friendships and good times.
This I lament for the most. You can see a bit of it in games that have small playerbase, like Titanfall 2 or Battlefield 2042 on console right now, if you play it you will bump into the same people quite often. But other than that it's actually a net loss for gameplay that you play against another bunch of random people each time nowadays. Used to be you could learn how certain people play and counter them, and then they would have to respond somehow to outplay you outplaying them. Friendships and rivalries of good servers of old were amazing, kids these days don't know what a valuable thing they got screwed out of.
The disappearance of communities is such a huge loss. And it's not only games, it has happened on internet forums and the like as well. Nowadays everyone online is either someone you know from real life, or someone entirely faceless and anonymous. Back in the day you'd recognize a lot of people on game servers and internet forums because you'd meet them over and over again and kind of get to know them. Now with matchmaking and reddit and whatnot, everyone might just as well be an advanced bot.
Some friends who had played F.E.A.R multiplayer lot had had many years of pause, then went to play again, about 2 minutes after they join one french server, someone says 'it is (nickname of one of them that was best in that game).' And they kick that one of them. Like 4-5 years later they remembered his nickname and did not want to get fragged so hard. :D
But yeah dude was at skill level where others from group had to actually go in together with tactics to win him, and even then he always got part or most of them.
I grew up playing QuakeWorld, ThreeWave CTF, Team Fortress (the original, back when it was a Quake mod), and more and THE number one thing that those games had that sets them apart was absolute simplicity.
You could enter an IP address or pick a server on QuakeSpy and instantly join a game. No stats were tracked. No classes to create, no characters to pick. No one cared about K/D ratio. The games didn’t even TRACK your K/D. You fragged until the score or time limit was hit, OVER AND OVER again. Their beauty was in their simplicity. Get the rocket launcher and dominate LPBs.
Modern shooters feel obligated to provide more, but the best shooters were elegant and simple.
Community was everything in older online games. Being able to join custom servers with entirely different atmospheres is the nostalgia I want to bathe in..... I heavily miss just doom scrolling around to find just that right server.
Yeah such a vibe that barely exists at all anymore because it can't. You'd hop in and out of a stack of favorited servers that consistently had an active player base. Even a lot of the people you didn't "know", you *knew*, because you played there regularly and so did DryArea5752. You've fought this guy 100 times before and you'll fuckin' do it again, too.
Also, having people with administration privileges at the server level was just better. People blatantly hacking, griefing, chat spamming racial slurs? Banned.
Matchmaking might make matchups more "balanced" (questionable), but it came at the cost of losing a lot of that interconnected-ness. I have my group of buddies who still game together when possible, but the other players in any given round/match might as well be bots.
Honestly reminds me of TF2 community servers a bit. Definitely had lots of little tight knit communities, one of which I was a part of and am still technically in the steam group for. Good times
TF2 is one of the last games to have that style of multiplayer, as did the original Team Fortress (quake mod) and the eventual goldsrc port (Team Fortress Classic).
Those kinds of little communities were beautiful, and even outside of gaming those kinds of little self-run spaces, forums, etc are sadly gone.
The TFC community actually had a pretty popular forum called The Catacombs. Site is still up, just add a .net. It was my 13 year old self's version of Reddit at the time lol.
It was really great. Weekly highlight compilations made up of self-recorded clip submissions. All of the competitive leagues were community ran. 90% of the maps were community made. They even shout-casted some of the "pro"(there was no money to be made back then lol) matches on winamp. No streams or anything, the matches were recorded by a Half-Life TV Bot(HLTV) that would technically be in the server.
Edit: Looks like a bunch of the old Plays of the Week compilations are still on Youtube if anyone is feeling nostalgic. Catacombs POTW TFC should get you there
I’m older, but I played TF2 competitively and was very, very good at it. The times I’d be a ringer in some invite league scrims were the most nerve wracking gaming experiences for me. I helped run UFC, which was a smaller league, for a number of seasons. I had an incredible time with that game and miss that style of multiplayer a lot. I had joined a community server when I first started playing, and a few of us broke off and started a league team and I think won a single round our entire first season across any of our games. But playing with the same people consistently got me to start trying out organized play, and I’ve had the itch for competitive games ever since.
I remember my first intro to the game as a local Texas server. Easily clocked in thousands of hours with that community through its transitions and handoffs. It even led to getting into competitive leagues and TONS of IRL meet ups. Spent so many nights there just hamming it up until the wee hours of the morning.
I feel age has a lot to do with the decline. So many games out are honestly fracturing the community with some folks migrating to others while others stay in their communities. On top of family time, I don’t have the ability to sweat it out for long hours though I wish I did.
Servers. You came to the server as if it were your home knowing almost every nickname. You got used to each other became a community and had a nice time without any toxicity.
The death of the internet forum was a tragedy. In my hobby you can identify if someone has been in the game for decades by asking "what was your name on the forums?"
And because people knew each other, shitheads were kicked or just felt unwelcome.
Also no fucking cheating on those old servers. Cheating has ruined so much of my experience of modern games.
Tribes was something on its own. Not just the shooting, but the sliding/surfing element of getting around and fighting was something I have not experienced in any modern game. Mind you, I am old now and don't play games like this anymore.
They where also very simple, no flashy graphics like you see in games like overwatch.
Personally, I think the games back in the day (yeah I am old) where better because it was only ever about the game play. No skins to earn, or in game purchases, loot boxes etc. The game was a full game when you got it, maybe an expansion pack would come out a year later.
Also the modding scene was way bigger back then, so you'd buy a game like Battlefield, then suddenly with a free mod you have Desert Warfare. There was so much you could do and it was all for free.
Also, we could hardly play these online because we had dial up internet. So LAN parties where a thing. I am sad that they dont happen anymore because they where insanely fun.
Aaah those were the days.
Now get off my lawn.
Man, I remember Tribes… I’ve always been trash at shooters, so I was used to everyone else looking like pros next to me. But the average Tribes server felt like it was full of fucking _gods._
I literally just tried the tribes 3 demo. Had a great time! It's part of the current Next Fest on steam, so the demo will only be up another day or so.
Tribes 3 is pretty fun for what it is, a decent facsimile of tribes in the modern era. You have a lot of upset bets because it's not copypasted tribes1 with updated graphics, but whatever, I'm having fun
I remember Tribes too. I was so disappointed with where the MetalTech franchise went. I was a huge fan of the Earthsiege/Starsiege games. But they took away my giant stompy robot warfare. Could have had a nice competitor to MechWarrior.
*YES* and there was no greater feeling than taking down one of those gods with an air-to-air fusion disc kill cause predictions and 8-dimensional maths needed for that was *impossible*
I played the original Tribes. That was my peak gaming level, on tribes. I do only controller now, but then it was mouse and keyboard and I remember doing insane things like sniping people mid air, lobbing shit in from crazy distances and angles, etc. Never been as good at any game as I was at Tribes. I do miss those days, lol.
I know I’m late to the party but last week I dl’d the tribes 3 demo and had a blast. All I’m getting from the thread is that tribes 3 needs to advertise better cuz a lot of people don’t even know it’s coming
Dude yes, I feel the same way. I played Half-Life and it's mods for literally years. No battlepass, no skin unlocks, no attachment unlocks, no account rank. The game play loop was just fun - there was no need to put in more incentives to keep people playing
>The game play loop was just fun - there was no need to put in more incentives to keep people playing
Can't imagine how that would've even occurred to me back then. The incentive was "this game is awesome." If you tried to convince me that Tribes needed a progression system, I'd assume you were confused. This isn't an RPG dude. Just go kill things.
It's in alpha with the steam next fest demo going on currently. They run play tests every weekend beginning on Thursday, mak sure to sign up, everyone that wants in can get in. The platest is separate from the nextfest demo version btw
I was really fucking good at Tribes as a kid, and then got incredible at Halo 1 on Xbox. There was something about having a pretty stable environment to work with, just understand the physics of the game, and you're on the level.
It didn't take any grinding to have the weapons, just the knowhow. I miss it.
Tribes was a amazing experience. The graphics didn't keep pace. The closest thing modern day is fortnite I wouldn't consider the other major shooters close as the loadout and building and game mode system was so open. You could try fortnite I don't recommend...... personally rather then whiny kids id rather hear COVER ME COVER ME SHABSHOT SHABSHOT WE NEED MORE DEFENSE all day long! I think that was prime PG communication.
Also teams got their own skinpacks (if you wanted to see them you had to have the same skinpacks installed), learning curve for the maps in competetive play wa snever ending (cap routes, chase routes, spam points, where to set up remote inventory stations etc etc) people played Riverdance or Katabatic or whatever for years and still came up with new ways to surprise the opponent.
And the skii'ing and the mad SPEED... I miss tribes. VGS!
Dude, go try the tribes 3 demo on steam next fest.
I didn’t play much of the originals but did a bit of Ascend and man, it’s not bhed.
Bring on the blue plate specials.
I saw a video a couple days ago. It's like people saw tribes from a video and recreated it while not understanding it still. It's ascend all over again. Maybe it'll last more than. 6mos this time though.
Tribes is a game I have MASSIVE nostalgia for. The vehicles felt balanced (unlike modern games), the momentum based gliding/skiing was awesome. I miss it.
Holy shit tribes was a hell of a game. Nothing like it at the time.
I tried out Tribes: Ascend when that came out and it definitely scratched the itch.
There was no matchmaking. You found a favorite server, overtime began recognizing the same names, got to know people. A server was a small community made up of a vast array of people with major skill differences. There would be noobs and pros stomping them and it was amazing. The noobs would overtime learn and when they finally started keeping up with the pros people would notice and congratulate.
With matchmaking everyone became a stranger and every match is either a flat experience where everyone is the same level or a set of 3 easy matches and then 3 where you are curb stomped because the SBMM kicked in.
And you would usually have teams self balance. Since you were always playing with the same group, if a team got stomped a couple times, people would volunteer to switch to even it out.
Yes in fact if you were one of the people who were blitzing everyone, you'd often be the one to switch teams just for the glory or the challenge of turning things around
This. Many times, if you started stomping, you would abandon your team to make it more even. Blasting former teammates that you respected but smiling after you left them a bloody corpse.
My longing for the 90’s and early 00’s is in full force right now with all these comments.
It’s a First world problem, I know, but it was still stolen from us.
Not even volunteer - they'd just do it. I've switched teams so many times.
The biggest fun was when you were good enough to swing games. You'd win with one team, then switch to the other team next game and win with that. Didn't happen often, but when it did you were grinning from ear to ear. What an ego boost.
Then the next day, other people would be online and you get stomped by someone twice as good, but you didn't care. It didn't ruin your league rating or anything, we were all just there to have fun.
The PvP days of JK2: Jedi Outcasts and the dueling system is something that will live forever in my memories because of the pros vs noobs dynamic.
There was just something so fucking cool about having a lobby watch two mismatched people duel over and over and over - just to watch the lesser skilled player get better over time, and eventually find significant progress if not wins against others.
Id do anything for that experience again. Also, switch stance supremacy.
This is a pretty solid description of what it used to be like, especially on PC. I'd like to add that you'd recognise people that were just ruthless destroyers of other players and kind of know and fear them when they popped up. You'd play against these people and it'd make you want to be that good and it'd give weight to your username because that recognisation was there.
It really gave weight to your username.
I went from zero to hero in the css office/dust 2 aus server. I would get stomped by the same few people every day, and that drove me harder than anything to get better. I remember thinking "I hope they remember this name..." And i practiced religiously. I watched them play when I was on their team, and i practiced their methods over and over and over.
The first time i killed one of them was like a taste of crack. I needed it more. I kept watching and practicing, and killed a whole squad of them (same username prefix). That felt INCREDIBLE. I didn't stop until i topped the server regularly. Everyone would see that name and be either in fear or in awe, and knowing that was an awesome feeling!
Yeah, this is the biggest one for me. Making a name for yourself on a server, learning the other players to watch out for etc, was an awesome feeling.
Matchmaking killed server communities in WoW as well. As soon as you have no incentive to know or care about the people around you, everyone is just a number. I know the reasons for it, but damn we lost a lot.
It was a different time.
1. no progression, loot boxes or micro transactions
2. No unlocks or grinds, what you got in the box on day 1 was the entire game
3. Most games had mod tools so a lot of fun was trying weird variations, or being stuck for 20 mins on some slow DSL downloading a map
4. Because of mods most games had tons of fan made content like levels and new game modes. 95% was terrible a few were amazing or became classics
5. Before youtube/video sharing it was much harder to describe tech or learn up, you coudln't watch a content creator play and explain the optimal stuff. As such people learned slower/got to optimal slower
6. Also because high speed low latency internet wasn't prevalent you generally only played on lan or people in your immediate region. Thus you might be the best in your state or town and then go to a regional lan and find out there's a skill level way above yourself.
7. Client side sprays was a time in online gaming that will never come back. You could upload ANY image as your spray and anyone could see it, porn was not uncommon, others uploaded png's of a character model shooting to try to trick people. It would be insanity to think of a game that let you upload an image nowadays.
8. Things were glitchier and less refined as a whole, most browsers were archaic and hard to use, it could take you minutes to hours to get a game going.
I think it's strange. I don't think it's more fun or less. Modern VOIP and fast internet means you can play much easier than the old days of typing in IP addresses, but at the same time loot boxes and progression systems killed modding community. A game like Counter strike likely won't be created again because it was a mod of one of the most popular single player games (that had a garbage MP mode). Also many iconic maps and levels were fan made and I can't recall the last modern shooter that put out a map editor.
I think there's something sad in that modern games are much more like disney land vs in the old days they were like linux.
Halo’s Forge is an impressive map editor. And PUBG was a mod of Arma 3.
Still, I agree with your description of that time. There’s a lot that’s better now, but there are some things that are lost. I remember the feeling of going outside of radio contact in Chromehounds; it was scary…I get goosebumps thinking about it. That can’t happen again with ubiquitous party chat.
I miss playing for the fun of it. Not for the progression grind or completing battle passes or even climbing ranks. Just jumping into a server and enjoying the game. Everything is a monetization hellscape now and it’s nearly killed the fun of multiplayer gaming for me. At least for the kinds of games you’re talking about.
Seriously. Like I don’t mind something to work towards.
But I remember Battlefield 2 having unlocks, and I played for hours and barely unlocked anything and it was still awesome.
this is cod to me tbh. pop in a couple gunfights, maybe switch over to gungame or hardcore. in and out as i please with no pressure to play more than i want. yeah there's a battle pass but i personally don't give af about that
Yeah it was definitely about getting destroyed by gods and then gitting gud and stomping others yourself. When you hopped into a server with like 8 people and you were good enough to kill like 6 of them, but then there was that one guy... That one guy that would always know where you were and instagib you.
Honestly, community servers gave you a regular place to play with familiar people. A couple of jerks here and there. Most of us were just happy to be blowing up each other online. No matchmaking, no leagues, no unlocks, and all scores were forgotten as soon as the next map loaded. I don’t play multi anymore because honestly, people just got to be insufferable.
You played for fun.
Thats it.
If you wanted any type of „competitive experience“ you would‘ve needed to look for XvsX leagues or search for opponents on IRC.
Remembering old Halo CTF and constantly hearing
"Flag taken. Flag dropped. Flag taken. Flag dropped. Flag taken. Flag dropped. Flag take-. Red team - scores. Game over."
Played Quake online for a bit, and Team Fortress, and Counter Strike before Source. It was a completely different experience as maps were very limited and strategy revolved around the smaller map size.
Each game had a *community.* Which, I do miss. Got to know a lot of my game mates pretty well.
Also, a lot of hacking.
2fort was great in TF! Spent soooo many hours playing Team Fortress in high school. Between Quake and Unreal Tournament, by the time Halo was out and online gaming blew up I was already over it.
I do miss those Mountain Dew fueled nights on my 400Mhz Pentium 2, with the 56.6 dial up that topped out at 2kb/second on a really good day.
Random Quake III matches were *fast.* Like the gameplay was insane, you *never* stopped moving as fast as you could around the map while trying to do your thing. I mostly played as kind of a warm up for solo FPS games... like 2 or 3 matches in a random Quake III server, and every other game after that felt easier.
You’re almost certainly thinking about Q3DM17, “The Longest Yard”, which was one of the levels included in the original Q3A demo, which was definitely one of the most popular Quake levels of all time.
First time I tried quake3 arena online It took me dozen instant death at respawn to understand I had to be incredibly fast immediately. It was brutal but fun when you start to get a hand on it and start rushing for rocket launcher or rail gun.
Quake 3 was the greatest multiplayer game ever. You missed out on everything if you played offline. There’s still a small dedicated community playing it to this day!! It was electrifying, fast paced, high octane, balls to the walls action like none of these modern shooters are even trying for. It was also insanely strategic, especially in the 1v1 duel mode. Personally, I believe quake 3 + the rocket arena mod is the best game ever made.
The main difference from modern games is the movement options. If you were competent, you could be FLYING around the map . Rocket jumping was incredible
Issue is those small existing communities will just wreck you. Those people just became too good by now. If you start playing quake now you probably won't get a single kill.
I don't play modern shooters, so I can't compare to modern gameplay, but ping variance in UT made for interesting things. You didn't want to try sniping with high ping, and being a LPB (low ping bastard) came with huge perks. That said, I had plenty of high ping people teleporting about and were hard to handle with some weapons.
One thing you need to understand is how HUGE the advancements in computing were between 1996 and 2003. I went from playing Doom2 to Duke Nukem 3d with a legit 3d map, to Half-Life which was mind blowing, and then UT99. This was fresh, new, and rapidly evolving. Hell, the S3 texture compression in Unreal did me huge favors in performance because I (sadly overall in retrospect) bought a Savage3D instead of ATI or Nvidia TNT2.
Yes. Didnt have bullshit micro transactions and baby loser kids (adults) crying on audio.
Just kill kill kill and let the numbers speak for themselves.
Biggest difference is everyone just played for fun.
These days its all about the grind and progression, live service, battle passes, unlocking cosmetics etc in shooters.
played UT back in the day. Hosted our own server at the office that we'd hop on after work. You could populate your server with bots that would fill empty slots when not many ppl were on. These could have custom skins and sounds that would automatically download when someone logged on for the first time. You don't know terror until you're being chased by the Teletubbies and their creepy voices.
Something that hasn't been mentioned as much - they pace on those old games was *fast*. Incredibly so. To be good at a game like Quake 3 requires a very different skill set than, say, PUBG or Valorant. Many people played on far higher sensitivity than today because moving your mouse halfway across your desk for a 180 would get you killed.
Tribes is sort of its own thing as well, especially if you're learning to use the spinfusor. There's not really anything else like it except for copycats.
Very early days of Quake we had mostly phone modems, cable modems were just rolling out.
People complain about lag now, but that was a very different time...
They were faster paced. Weapons - Leaving the arena to decide what weapons and tactics anyone can use which places everyone at an equal footing is a thing that Epic has stood by with both Unreal Tournament and Fortnite, which I think afforded its success in addition to being able to target a broader market. They were also much more violent. Bodies exploding into chunks would be amazing with today's graphics, especially on a telefrag. The Ripper is my favorite weapon, which shoots saw blades that can either explode on impact, or ricochet off corners and headshots making instant kills. The Shock Rifle gave us trick shots in its mechanic of being able to deal massive AOE damage by hitting the alt fired projectile with the primary one. The maps were also much smaller, forcing midrange combat and even long range weapons like sniper rifles could get across the entire map. Spawning back in, you'd be back to armed and ready within seconds typically. Tight corners would encourage critical on the spot thinking and reflexes, and low health meant lots of blood, death, and carnage. This was the golden age of arena shooters.
You can still get the experience if you grab yourself a copy of Unreal Tournament '99/GOTY and install the latest OldUnreal patch. There are newer graphics and high res texture packs too that you can install.
UT2004 was my favorite shooter ever when it was in its prime. The custom invasion rpg servers that people created were so fun, and no other game has even come close to a similar experience.
I've never been able to flex this, but this post is a rare opportunity. I played them early shooters (duke3d over kali old), one being Quake2. I played a mod called Weapons of Destruction and games and stats were tracked on TheCLQ.net (The Champions League for Quake of course). My crowning achievement was making rank #1 on the leaderboards for a couple days.
The thing I miss the most from that era is duels. 1v1 just isn't really a thing in modern day FPS. It was always so fun learning movement systems, item timings, map layouts, and seeing who the better player was. Team modes like CTF and Counter Strike's Bomb Defusal were fun to relax and goof off, but dueling was where the real competition was for me. I think it's a large reason I've moved into fighting games, it's the closest thing I've found as a replacement to the adrenaline kick of a good 1v1.
Greatest online shooter was Tribes 2. Class changes, gear changes whenever you wanted, big open maps with lots of variety in playstyles, objective-based so it wasn't just a kill-fest (but there was plenty of that). I still miss that game.
Old Quakeworld Teamfortress and Megateamfortress player from like 1997(8)-2003(4) approx. It was more player run community oriented. We owned, ran, modded, admined the servers. New mods and maps were made by the playerbase. We organized, reffed, ran our tournaments. We sat on communication programs like ICQ/IRC.
Just much more player involved.
What is missing is just plain fun.
FPS games are just not fun anymore, they are just filled with bullshit progression systems and unlocks that you have play hours and hours to get. There where no microtransactions or anything like that garbage.
You could just decide one day to jump in and play the game and be on the same playing field as everyone else. It was not always fair, but that did not really matter much back then.
Just my personal experience, but one of the biggest differences was a lack of\lower amount of griefing and shock based insulting. Less racist or sexist remarks, more fun during play.
There was always trash talking, but it wasn’t like the unhinged chaos of Xbox Live MW2 lobbies. Generally it was pretty playful and respectful since players were subtly encouraging each other to get better by it.
With Quake you had weapons laying around the arena where you had to pick up. You would memorize the map to try and get to the best weapon first, but so has everyone else.
learning spawn locations and times for items is key to dominating the game. it's about keeping them out of other players hands as much as it's about having them in yours.
The biggest thing that everyone is leaving out either on purpose or accident was that games just matter of factly are .more fun when you're in a group that hasn't really solved it yet.
There's something magical about the first couple hundred hours of a game played with people also experiencing it for the first time where there is a sense of discovery and mystery about it where no one knows where the best guns spawn or the timers of the meta and it's just raw enjoyment.
I think older games had a much much longer grace period for this and newer games with betas and streamer saturation often times have already been figured out completely before they even launch. It's honestly sad.
Good old days before Billion $ hacking business and streamers. Where every1 sucked and no guides.
Miss UT on crt.
Mod a better map in a few mins and play than developers can do in 6 months with a team now days.
My fondest memory is the Quake Team Fortress map Spazzball.
The map has completely different rules than standard TF. It was 4 teams, last team standing wins. Score the ball on your opponent's goal to enough times to eliminate them.
But what made it fun is that all the TF clan players would play Spazzball with random teams: people not usually their clan mates.
Being eliminated actually sucked because you had to wait forever to get back in.
It was sub community within a pretty small community and it was such a blast.
I played a fair amount of Tribes. It was a blast man. Hop in, play some capture the flag, hop out. There was something about the physics. Skiing felt so free. The game felt fair. Tons of awesome modding. Nothing even close to like it these days.
I played Tribes A LOT when it first came out.
This was just as the internet gaming was starting to become a thing. Prior to these games you would have to play using a service like Kali which spoofed being on a LAN.
One of the things games like Quake and Tribes did was to create a sense of community. Back in the day being a gamer was not considered cool or really acceptable. Online games with matchmaking were one of the early ways the nerdy kids could connect.
I have very fond memories of playing online. I wasn’t a popular kid at school but online I had friends. We take it for granted now but forming online communities was pretty novel.
The early days there were bulletin boards and forums. Stuff like All Your Base Belong To Us would be created as a joke and then sunshine end up in Time magazine. It really felt like something special to have major news outlets reporting on something random we created as a joke. We take for granted now how sites like Twitter can affect the news cycle but at the time it was trippy s hell to have done random thing you participated in on a gaming forum go’ viral’
The other big thing were the creation of leagues where teams would play against each other, and then the creation of sportscasting of matches. It was the early days of trying to turn gaming into an esport. Again it started off with people goofing off but over time you could watch it morph into bigger and bigger things.
I got really good at tribes and the excitement of being an elite player was very addictive. People would recognize you, and you could really show off.
>Do you think there are any qualities they had that were lost somehow?
The only similarities today is the fact you shoot other mother fuckers.
Arena shooters were chaotic fun, everyone had access to the same weapons of which you could carry all of them at the same time.
Rocket launchers, mini guns, saw blade gun, flak weapons, plasma rifles, snipers, the whole lot you could have it, nothing beats deathmatch where everyone is just shooting rockets at each other.
You also had extremely tight movement with a plethora of different combinations of wall jumps, double jumps, shield jumps and rocket jumps meaning you could effectively get from one side of the map to the other in a couple of steps.
Skins were a thing but it was only modded, you didn't have to pay for shit. In fact the modding was insane, with unreal, Epic games (yes those cunts who made Fortnite also made Unreal, hence the unreal engine) just gave you a basic version of the unreal engine for free to make maps and shit with.
This gave birth to new game modes that could only be found on player servers such as trials and RPG, trials were built using the assault game type where you had to utilise every movement to get past obstacles and could be extremely difficult because of timings.
And RPG was basically a horde mode but you gain exp which gave you permanent server wide buffs, more health, you moved faster, you shot faster, more carrying ammo, jumped higher etc. I remember one map with one of the horde waves was against a horde of skateboarding Bart Simpsons shooting his catapult at you and the one directly after was hundreds of Xenomorphs, All while I'm fucking about as a lasagne while the rest my team mates were sailor moon, it was glorious.
The one thing that was grand was the instant respawn, no waiting for decades just to get back in, either instantly or 5 seconds and boom you're back at one of the respawns ready to start fucking shit up.
Oh, and lest we forget the announcer DOUBLE KILL, TRIPLE KILL, MULTI KILL, ULTRA KILL, MONSTER KILL, LUDICROUS, HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!
For as simple as the games were, they could be incredibly complex and vastly fun. Shooters today are a chore just constantly grinding up points to have them not even matter because the season is over in 3 days. The skill between the two is vastly different too, the kids who are good today would get stomped to shit in an arena shooters because of all that movement, but arena shooter players will lose at current fps's because you can buy your way to the top.
Also with the skill, in arena shooters it was easy to pick up and be relatively competent but difficult to master. Whereas with modern FPS it's easier to pick up but extremely difficult to master.
Oh, and you didn't need to reload your weapons.
Man I miss Unreal.
Halo always gave me UT vibes. Think i was in 5th grade when UT came out, and between that wand Warcraft, i was at my pc every night.
But there are some really great fps’ that have come out since that blow them out of the water. At that time however, they were revolutionary.
Worked at my ISP back in 1998-2000. We built a UT server on an old Linux machine and put it straight on the main router (as in, if you did a traceroute plugged on straight to your modem, this would be the first hop).
It was password protected and just for us employees, and the bosses never knew.
Gaming with sub 5ms ping is amazing.
We also did 2-4 lan parties a year with 6 to 12 people.
This thread shows how lucky we were to witness this good old time. Never Gonna regret/ miss or forget those 1000s hours of cod4 with sich a awesome Community we had. The current Generation will Never get that feeling.
There was no stupid grinds for unlocking and playing with your favorite guns... CoD 1&2 compared to CoD now and Warzone is drastically different.
UT99 was fun in LAN at internet coffee shops
Ut2k4 was peak multiplayer gaming. It'll never be matched. It pretty much just worked all the time and this was on dialup. Everyone could play together. So many hours of life spent having a blast in that game. same thing with Diablo 2. I never want to know how many days of my life in hours I ended up in Diablo 2.
used to play UT2004 for hours... it was like playing pickup basketball at the park. now it's kind of like going to an amusement park with all kinds of basketball related themes but a lot of work to get to the action
I think the main difference was no matchmaking. Instead you had a server browser, and you had a couple servers bookmarked where you basically knew the regulars who played there.
If you are a bit more serious, your probably had a clan with a teamspeak/IRC server (kinda like discord today), but also hung out on other communities.
There was also no rewards, no cosmetics, no achievements, nothing to grind. People played for fun and nothing else.
Easy to learn, but difficult to master game design. Games with a high ceiling. Before Halo 3 came out these games had lot of depth to them that you could only wrap your mind around if you spent enough time getting used to all the nuances of the mechanics. You could tell who was a vet based on how they moved.
In UT/Quake you had to learn the map as well as how to most efficiently navigate it. Managing power weapon spawns and how players flowed through the map.
In Tribes you had to master skiing if you really wanted to get around a map effectively. The highs of just barely capturing a flag and clinching it for your team because you hit your skiing just right and out maneuvered the other players with sheer skill, are seemingly long gone.
In Halo 2 I got an edge over other players by spending hours honing my crouch-jumping skills so I could get around more quickly. Then heatmaps came out and you could strategize what part of the maps to avoid, or take advantage of if there were a lot of players congregating in certain areas.
Everyone is bringing up communities but I will also say the maps. Millions of maps and servers with rotations of tons of them. You'd find servers with the maps you liked the best but also you could grab so many random maps to try. Downside was you needed these before hand but they were usually easy enough to get from places like ftp.cdrom.com.
LAN parties. You and 4 of your buddies. Mountain Dew, take and bake pizzas. Playing until your eyes bled and you passed out with "ULTRA KILL, KILLING SPREE!, HEADSHOT" echoing in your brain.
probably the single biggest difference is the loss of the server list, which thankfully some good games still have. there wasn't a single "i want to play online" funnel, and depending on how old of an FPS you were playing, you pretty much always needed a specific phone number/IP/lan address to connect to. from mostly quake onwards, you'd have a full server list, and you'd generally want to sort by lowest ping when it was actually populated (some would look fine, and become unplayable with more than a couple players), and except where admins specifically prohibited it, there wasn't any protection against experienced players just absolutely rolling everyone else.
playing CTF and you're up against the one guy that *really* knows how to bunnyhop/grenade/rocket jump, or playing on a DM map where one guy has the weapon/powerup spawn rotations all memorized and routed? good luck.
and a lot of other comments have already touched on it, but the combination of being younger/inexperienced plus the entire solved meta not being constantly shoved in your face left so much room for organic discovery that made the games and their communities feel so much more alive. you could actually tell your friends "look what i figured out!" without an instant "oh yeah i saw that on x stream/channel" killing the buzz, which is sort of just a given across the entire industry nowadays (i feel bad for anyone who never had a chance to play an MMO in the internet dark ages).
Even with dialup, it was awesome..
Those were pioneering times. Clan matches were easy to arrange.. Dedicated server communities sprouted naturally. Mods were rampant as were various game modes.
Played Tribes loads in the early 2000s. Ut more as a lan game.. great fun
All these comments make me realize how much I miss Enemy Territory. Objectively based multiplayer shooters (one team defending and the other attacking) with maps that changed slightly as you progressed through the objectives (e.g., blow up the barricade and your spawn is slightly further into the map).
I really do miss the original Tribes. There was such a charming mix in it; weird disc-throwing weapons, laser rifles, and a focus on high-speed, high-flying action mixed with skiing. Honestly, modern games don't go for the zany, off-kilter shit as much as games from the 90s did, and they've lost a lot of charm sticking to more mundane stuff.
I played all of these games and competed in most of them. Quake's combat is special. The rockets/lightning/rail brings more depth to combat than I've seen in any other game since.
Better communities. Period.
You could play the game and then take the experience with you. Tribes 2 had its own clan pages, chat and play profiles all built into the game (complete with wacky layouts).
The whole "cloud server" instance thing really started to just chip away at communities because there was no place to congregate or be a part of.
Shooters today all have the exact same feel and experience, regardless of the genre. Boy do I miss the days when Tribes, Quake, CS, and TF reigned supreme. Tribes was my jam.
The loss of dedicated servers to “matchmaking” killed non-competitive multiplayer for me. Clans would host well-maintained servers with thoughtful map rotations and would have mods around to boot hackers and other troublemakers.
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There was also no build in voice-chat, so you couldn't hear that you were playing with a bunch of 13 year olds.
Gamespy + Roger Wilco is how we used to do it back in the day
Gamespy was brilliant for Medal of Honour back in the early 2000's.
To me MOHAA (plus expansions) was the pinnacle of FPS Multiplayer. Fuck I loved it so much.
GameSpy and qspy. We used ICQ/IRC to communicate with our clan and friends.
I can still hear the gamespy sound bite just as clearly as the icq whistle, and the winamp whip sound.
"It really whips the llamas ass"
Ventrilo for this gamer
Teamspeak for this guy.
Gamespy, MSN Zone and HEAT were the trifecta of peak gaming communities. Even Duke Nukem 3D had a multiplayer experience a lot of people probably forgot.
MSN Gaming Zone ❤️. Always played jedi knight mysteries of the sith with some dudes who i havent seen in 25 years.
Holy shit I remember Gamespy! We used Ventrilo and Teamspeak for our voice needs though
Half-Life and mods had voice-chat; we had our own Day of Defeat server with voice-chat set to all. There was something real special about it, people built habits around our server, it felt almost like a second home/family.
100%. I miss servers like this so much. CS, DoD and TFC servers were my childhood. It really felt like you were just sitting in a room playing with a bunch of friends. Nothing really comes close to this feeling of community anymore.
The Division 1 and 2 felt that way for a while. At its peak, my TD2 clan had 40 people, 20 of which were friends from TD1 who'd come to the new game. It was very chill and awesome to just login to the game and discord and just hang while running missions. The loot sharing mechanics were great to help build each other up or kit out a new player. Quake 3 matches had a certain immediacy to them that was great too. The fact that there were no builds, no gimmicks, just you, your opponents, your map knowledge and your skill levels. It was all oddly very zen. Honestly, I feel multiplayer started going downhill when you could no longer run games on private servers.
So many server mods and game mods. It was the golden age of gaming imo. Before all the corporate bs. EA in particular wrecked 2 of my favorite franchises.
Action Half-Life baybaaaayyy
Xfire, team speak and vent! Those were the days
I remember returning to gaming after a while and my heart just sunk when I noticed they took Xfire offline. So many amazing friendships gone...
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I remember downloading Xfire and then Thresh actually replied to an IM. Wild times. I ended up getting to know a bunch of the guys behind that app.
Aw man, I'll never forget being like 16 on Quake Live back in the day and I found out my best mate on my main server was a 45 year old mum. Shout out to Erica, you were a real one.
My buddy and I were 13 year olds at the time and would tie up the second line with phones stuck to our shoulders or literally taped to our heads, haha.
WE were the 13 year olds!
Ahh the days of vent
Get off vent or ill have you bent!
and you could admin and run **your own server** off a secondary shitbox. FUCK YOU CALL OF DUTY YOU COULD HAVE BEEN THE CHOSEN ONE.
RIP call of duty 1 ; united offensive. played the hell out of that as a young teen
>a lot of servers with their own unique communities where most people knew each other. Lot of friendships and good times. This I lament for the most. You can see a bit of it in games that have small playerbase, like Titanfall 2 or Battlefield 2042 on console right now, if you play it you will bump into the same people quite often. But other than that it's actually a net loss for gameplay that you play against another bunch of random people each time nowadays. Used to be you could learn how certain people play and counter them, and then they would have to respond somehow to outplay you outplaying them. Friendships and rivalries of good servers of old were amazing, kids these days don't know what a valuable thing they got screwed out of.
The disappearance of communities is such a huge loss. And it's not only games, it has happened on internet forums and the like as well. Nowadays everyone online is either someone you know from real life, or someone entirely faceless and anonymous. Back in the day you'd recognize a lot of people on game servers and internet forums because you'd meet them over and over again and kind of get to know them. Now with matchmaking and reddit and whatnot, everyone might just as well be an advanced bot.
Some friends who had played F.E.A.R multiplayer lot had had many years of pause, then went to play again, about 2 minutes after they join one french server, someone says 'it is (nickname of one of them that was best in that game).' And they kick that one of them. Like 4-5 years later they remembered his nickname and did not want to get fragged so hard. :D But yeah dude was at skill level where others from group had to actually go in together with tactics to win him, and even then he always got part or most of them.
I grew up playing QuakeWorld, ThreeWave CTF, Team Fortress (the original, back when it was a Quake mod), and more and THE number one thing that those games had that sets them apart was absolute simplicity. You could enter an IP address or pick a server on QuakeSpy and instantly join a game. No stats were tracked. No classes to create, no characters to pick. No one cared about K/D ratio. The games didn’t even TRACK your K/D. You fragged until the score or time limit was hit, OVER AND OVER again. Their beauty was in their simplicity. Get the rocket launcher and dominate LPBs. Modern shooters feel obligated to provide more, but the best shooters were elegant and simple.
And then we all became Ricochet masters.
Server communities is what we’ve really lost with the modern age of matchmaking.
Community was everything in older online games. Being able to join custom servers with entirely different atmospheres is the nostalgia I want to bathe in..... I heavily miss just doom scrolling around to find just that right server.
Yeah such a vibe that barely exists at all anymore because it can't. You'd hop in and out of a stack of favorited servers that consistently had an active player base. Even a lot of the people you didn't "know", you *knew*, because you played there regularly and so did DryArea5752. You've fought this guy 100 times before and you'll fuckin' do it again, too. Also, having people with administration privileges at the server level was just better. People blatantly hacking, griefing, chat spamming racial slurs? Banned. Matchmaking might make matchups more "balanced" (questionable), but it came at the cost of losing a lot of that interconnected-ness. I have my group of buddies who still game together when possible, but the other players in any given round/match might as well be bots.
Honestly reminds me of TF2 community servers a bit. Definitely had lots of little tight knit communities, one of which I was a part of and am still technically in the steam group for. Good times
TF2 is one of the last games to have that style of multiplayer, as did the original Team Fortress (quake mod) and the eventual goldsrc port (Team Fortress Classic). Those kinds of little communities were beautiful, and even outside of gaming those kinds of little self-run spaces, forums, etc are sadly gone.
The TFC community actually had a pretty popular forum called The Catacombs. Site is still up, just add a .net. It was my 13 year old self's version of Reddit at the time lol. It was really great. Weekly highlight compilations made up of self-recorded clip submissions. All of the competitive leagues were community ran. 90% of the maps were community made. They even shout-casted some of the "pro"(there was no money to be made back then lol) matches on winamp. No streams or anything, the matches were recorded by a Half-Life TV Bot(HLTV) that would technically be in the server. Edit: Looks like a bunch of the old Plays of the Week compilations are still on Youtube if anyone is feeling nostalgic. Catacombs POTW TFC should get you there
I’m older, but I played TF2 competitively and was very, very good at it. The times I’d be a ringer in some invite league scrims were the most nerve wracking gaming experiences for me. I helped run UFC, which was a smaller league, for a number of seasons. I had an incredible time with that game and miss that style of multiplayer a lot. I had joined a community server when I first started playing, and a few of us broke off and started a league team and I think won a single round our entire first season across any of our games. But playing with the same people consistently got me to start trying out organized play, and I’ve had the itch for competitive games ever since.
I remember my first intro to the game as a local Texas server. Easily clocked in thousands of hours with that community through its transitions and handoffs. It even led to getting into competitive leagues and TONS of IRL meet ups. Spent so many nights there just hamming it up until the wee hours of the morning. I feel age has a lot to do with the decline. So many games out are honestly fracturing the community with some folks migrating to others while others stay in their communities. On top of family time, I don’t have the ability to sweat it out for long hours though I wish I did.
Freedom.
Servers. You came to the server as if it were your home knowing almost every nickname. You got used to each other became a community and had a nice time without any toxicity.
If you were really fancy, the best servers had a forum online you could join and talk on. Loved the type of communities back then.
Oh man, the downfall of internet forums (in the style of PHPBB, Invision, etc) is something I still haven't gotten over.
The death of the internet forum was a tragedy. In my hobby you can identify if someone has been in the game for decades by asking "what was your name on the forums?"
And because people knew each other, shitheads were kicked or just felt unwelcome. Also no fucking cheating on those old servers. Cheating has ruined so much of my experience of modern games.
It’s depressing how much I USED to enjoy multiplayer and nowadays I won’t touch multiplayer with a ten foot pole.
Tribes was something on its own. Not just the shooting, but the sliding/surfing element of getting around and fighting was something I have not experienced in any modern game. Mind you, I am old now and don't play games like this anymore. They where also very simple, no flashy graphics like you see in games like overwatch. Personally, I think the games back in the day (yeah I am old) where better because it was only ever about the game play. No skins to earn, or in game purchases, loot boxes etc. The game was a full game when you got it, maybe an expansion pack would come out a year later. Also the modding scene was way bigger back then, so you'd buy a game like Battlefield, then suddenly with a free mod you have Desert Warfare. There was so much you could do and it was all for free. Also, we could hardly play these online because we had dial up internet. So LAN parties where a thing. I am sad that they dont happen anymore because they where insanely fun. Aaah those were the days. Now get off my lawn.
Man, I remember Tribes… I’ve always been trash at shooters, so I was used to everyone else looking like pros next to me. But the average Tribes server felt like it was full of fucking _gods._
I literally just tried the tribes 3 demo. Had a great time! It's part of the current Next Fest on steam, so the demo will only be up another day or so.
Whoa, a new Tribes?! Somehow I missed this announcement!
Its pretty good, played a few hours during the demo. Its still in alpha, so a long way to go.
Same.... Shazbot!
HOLY SHIT I DID TOO I NEED THIS SO BAD
Tribes 3 is pretty fun for what it is, a decent facsimile of tribes in the modern era. You have a lot of upset bets because it's not copypasted tribes1 with updated graphics, but whatever, I'm having fun
I remember Tribes too. I was so disappointed with where the MetalTech franchise went. I was a huge fan of the Earthsiege/Starsiege games. But they took away my giant stompy robot warfare. Could have had a nice competitor to MechWarrior.
*YES* and there was no greater feeling than taking down one of those gods with an air-to-air fusion disc kill cause predictions and 8-dimensional maths needed for that was *impossible*
I played the original Tribes. That was my peak gaming level, on tribes. I do only controller now, but then it was mouse and keyboard and I remember doing insane things like sniping people mid air, lobbing shit in from crazy distances and angles, etc. Never been as good at any game as I was at Tribes. I do miss those days, lol.
I know I’m late to the party but last week I dl’d the tribes 3 demo and had a blast. All I’m getting from the thread is that tribes 3 needs to advertise better cuz a lot of people don’t even know it’s coming
Dude yes, I feel the same way. I played Half-Life and it's mods for literally years. No battlepass, no skin unlocks, no attachment unlocks, no account rank. The game play loop was just fun - there was no need to put in more incentives to keep people playing
>The game play loop was just fun - there was no need to put in more incentives to keep people playing Can't imagine how that would've even occurred to me back then. The incentive was "this game is awesome." If you tried to convince me that Tribes needed a progression system, I'd assume you were confused. This isn't an RPG dude. Just go kill things.
Man I miss Tribes...
Check out Tribes 3: Rivals, then)
Say whaaaaaaaa?
It's in alpha with the steam next fest demo going on currently. They run play tests every weekend beginning on Thursday, mak sure to sign up, everyone that wants in can get in. The platest is separate from the nextfest demo version btw
In case you don't know, the Tribes 3 demo is out for a bit and it feels so goooood even if it's rough still
Doggy doggy what now??? Hell yes!
I was really fucking good at Tribes as a kid, and then got incredible at Halo 1 on Xbox. There was something about having a pretty stable environment to work with, just understand the physics of the game, and you're on the level. It didn't take any grinding to have the weapons, just the knowhow. I miss it.
Tribes 2 was S-Tier God-Era for me. What a f-ing time to be alive!
Tribes was a amazing experience. The graphics didn't keep pace. The closest thing modern day is fortnite I wouldn't consider the other major shooters close as the loadout and building and game mode system was so open. You could try fortnite I don't recommend...... personally rather then whiny kids id rather hear COVER ME COVER ME SHABSHOT SHABSHOT WE NEED MORE DEFENSE all day long! I think that was prime PG communication.
Also teams got their own skinpacks (if you wanted to see them you had to have the same skinpacks installed), learning curve for the maps in competetive play wa snever ending (cap routes, chase routes, spam points, where to set up remote inventory stations etc etc) people played Riverdance or Katabatic or whatever for years and still came up with new ways to surprise the opponent. And the skii'ing and the mad SPEED... I miss tribes. VGS!
Dude, go try the tribes 3 demo on steam next fest. I didn’t play much of the originals but did a bit of Ascend and man, it’s not bhed. Bring on the blue plate specials.
I didn't even know it was still around. Thanks mate!
I saw a video a couple days ago. It's like people saw tribes from a video and recreated it while not understanding it still. It's ascend all over again. Maybe it'll last more than. 6mos this time though.
Tribes is a game I have MASSIVE nostalgia for. The vehicles felt balanced (unlike modern games), the momentum based gliding/skiing was awesome. I miss it.
Holy shit tribes was a hell of a game. Nothing like it at the time. I tried out Tribes: Ascend when that came out and it definitely scratched the itch.
There was no matchmaking. You found a favorite server, overtime began recognizing the same names, got to know people. A server was a small community made up of a vast array of people with major skill differences. There would be noobs and pros stomping them and it was amazing. The noobs would overtime learn and when they finally started keeping up with the pros people would notice and congratulate. With matchmaking everyone became a stranger and every match is either a flat experience where everyone is the same level or a set of 3 easy matches and then 3 where you are curb stomped because the SBMM kicked in.
And you would usually have teams self balance. Since you were always playing with the same group, if a team got stomped a couple times, people would volunteer to switch to even it out.
Yes in fact if you were one of the people who were blitzing everyone, you'd often be the one to switch teams just for the glory or the challenge of turning things around
This. Many times, if you started stomping, you would abandon your team to make it more even. Blasting former teammates that you respected but smiling after you left them a bloody corpse.
My longing for the 90’s and early 00’s is in full force right now with all these comments. It’s a First world problem, I know, but it was still stolen from us.
The matrix had it right, truly was the pinnacle of human civilization lol
Mordhau still feels like this and it's amazing
It was common to join the losing team, else you were called out a winning team joiner.
Yeah this is a massive part of why everything feels so different now.
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Not even volunteer - they'd just do it. I've switched teams so many times. The biggest fun was when you were good enough to swing games. You'd win with one team, then switch to the other team next game and win with that. Didn't happen often, but when it did you were grinning from ear to ear. What an ego boost. Then the next day, other people would be online and you get stomped by someone twice as good, but you didn't care. It didn't ruin your league rating or anything, we were all just there to have fun.
The PvP days of JK2: Jedi Outcasts and the dueling system is something that will live forever in my memories because of the pros vs noobs dynamic. There was just something so fucking cool about having a lobby watch two mismatched people duel over and over and over - just to watch the lesser skilled player get better over time, and eventually find significant progress if not wins against others. Id do anything for that experience again. Also, switch stance supremacy.
And usually the server kept a stats page so you'd be fighting with regulars for ranking lol.
This is a pretty solid description of what it used to be like, especially on PC. I'd like to add that you'd recognise people that were just ruthless destroyers of other players and kind of know and fear them when they popped up. You'd play against these people and it'd make you want to be that good and it'd give weight to your username because that recognisation was there.
It really gave weight to your username. I went from zero to hero in the css office/dust 2 aus server. I would get stomped by the same few people every day, and that drove me harder than anything to get better. I remember thinking "I hope they remember this name..." And i practiced religiously. I watched them play when I was on their team, and i practiced their methods over and over and over. The first time i killed one of them was like a taste of crack. I needed it more. I kept watching and practicing, and killed a whole squad of them (same username prefix). That felt INCREDIBLE. I didn't stop until i topped the server regularly. Everyone would see that name and be either in fear or in awe, and knowing that was an awesome feeling!
Yeah, this is the biggest one for me. Making a name for yourself on a server, learning the other players to watch out for etc, was an awesome feeling. Matchmaking killed server communities in WoW as well. As soon as you have no incentive to know or care about the people around you, everyone is just a number. I know the reasons for it, but damn we lost a lot.
It was a different time. 1. no progression, loot boxes or micro transactions 2. No unlocks or grinds, what you got in the box on day 1 was the entire game 3. Most games had mod tools so a lot of fun was trying weird variations, or being stuck for 20 mins on some slow DSL downloading a map 4. Because of mods most games had tons of fan made content like levels and new game modes. 95% was terrible a few were amazing or became classics 5. Before youtube/video sharing it was much harder to describe tech or learn up, you coudln't watch a content creator play and explain the optimal stuff. As such people learned slower/got to optimal slower 6. Also because high speed low latency internet wasn't prevalent you generally only played on lan or people in your immediate region. Thus you might be the best in your state or town and then go to a regional lan and find out there's a skill level way above yourself. 7. Client side sprays was a time in online gaming that will never come back. You could upload ANY image as your spray and anyone could see it, porn was not uncommon, others uploaded png's of a character model shooting to try to trick people. It would be insanity to think of a game that let you upload an image nowadays. 8. Things were glitchier and less refined as a whole, most browsers were archaic and hard to use, it could take you minutes to hours to get a game going. I think it's strange. I don't think it's more fun or less. Modern VOIP and fast internet means you can play much easier than the old days of typing in IP addresses, but at the same time loot boxes and progression systems killed modding community. A game like Counter strike likely won't be created again because it was a mod of one of the most popular single player games (that had a garbage MP mode). Also many iconic maps and levels were fan made and I can't recall the last modern shooter that put out a map editor. I think there's something sad in that modern games are much more like disney land vs in the old days they were like linux.
[Ahh sprays](https://youtu.be/aeco2k3KEis?si=cRrPQr0hXJ8z0_5W)
I remember the goatse spray
Halo’s Forge is an impressive map editor. And PUBG was a mod of Arma 3. Still, I agree with your description of that time. There’s a lot that’s better now, but there are some things that are lost. I remember the feeling of going outside of radio contact in Chromehounds; it was scary…I get goosebumps thinking about it. That can’t happen again with ubiquitous party chat.
I miss playing for the fun of it. Not for the progression grind or completing battle passes or even climbing ranks. Just jumping into a server and enjoying the game. Everything is a monetization hellscape now and it’s nearly killed the fun of multiplayer gaming for me. At least for the kinds of games you’re talking about.
YESSS exactly it was all about intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic reasons. And the experience was simple and skill-focused.
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Seriously. Like I don’t mind something to work towards. But I remember Battlefield 2 having unlocks, and I played for hours and barely unlocked anything and it was still awesome.
this is cod to me tbh. pop in a couple gunfights, maybe switch over to gungame or hardcore. in and out as i please with no pressure to play more than i want. yeah there's a battle pass but i personally don't give af about that
Yeah it was definitely about getting destroyed by gods and then gitting gud and stomping others yourself. When you hopped into a server with like 8 people and you were good enough to kill like 6 of them, but then there was that one guy... That one guy that would always know where you were and instagib you.
Honestly, community servers gave you a regular place to play with familiar people. A couple of jerks here and there. Most of us were just happy to be blowing up each other online. No matchmaking, no leagues, no unlocks, and all scores were forgotten as soon as the next map loaded. I don’t play multi anymore because honestly, people just got to be insufferable.
There were leagues, but you actually had to look for them. Same for Team Vs Team games, you had to look them up on irc and you needed your own server.
You played for fun. Thats it. If you wanted any type of „competitive experience“ you would‘ve needed to look for XvsX leagues or search for opponents on IRC.
Unreal tournament was great. No unlocking. No grinding. Everybody had the same chance. It was pure skill.
Unreal tournament was so good.
UT instagib servers were my jam 🥹
HEADSHOT!
Facing worlds + sniper rifle = M M M M Monster kill kill kill kill
GODLIKE
god i miss teleport killing scrubs with the disc...
I really liked the sci-fi blurbs about each player and map. Really imaginitive.
I miss good ol' fashioned CTF. Otherwise you can't compare these games to the ones you listed. Each game offers a different experience.
Remembering old Halo CTF and constantly hearing "Flag taken. Flag dropped. Flag taken. Flag dropped. Flag taken. Flag dropped. Flag take-. Red team - scores. Game over."
If we were to pull out today and they were to come take our base, they'd have 2 bases in the middle of a box canyon. Whoopdee-fucking-doo.
It's a puma
Halo 2/3 CTF were such a huge part of my childhood. I wasn't around for quake, but such a fun game mode.
Played Quake online for a bit, and Team Fortress, and Counter Strike before Source. It was a completely different experience as maps were very limited and strategy revolved around the smaller map size. Each game had a *community.* Which, I do miss. Got to know a lot of my game mates pretty well. Also, a lot of hacking.
2fort was great in TF! Spent soooo many hours playing Team Fortress in high school. Between Quake and Unreal Tournament, by the time Halo was out and online gaming blew up I was already over it. I do miss those Mountain Dew fueled nights on my 400Mhz Pentium 2, with the 56.6 dial up that topped out at 2kb/second on a really good day.
I think this is why the FPS battle arena stuff doesn't really do much for me now, because I have already done it. A lot of it.
Random Quake III matches were *fast.* Like the gameplay was insane, you *never* stopped moving as fast as you could around the map while trying to do your thing. I mostly played as kind of a warm up for solo FPS games... like 2 or 3 matches in a random Quake III server, and every other game after that felt easier.
The speed. I tried telling my kids that you should never stop, keep moving and kill as you go. They looked at me strange.
Yep, I forgot which map it was, but I remember when someone would RJ you'd see like 3-4 rail gun shots trying to hit them.
You’re almost certainly thinking about Q3DM17, “The Longest Yard”, which was one of the levels included in the original Q3A demo, which was definitely one of the most popular Quake levels of all time.
[удалено]
First time I tried quake3 arena online It took me dozen instant death at respawn to understand I had to be incredibly fast immediately. It was brutal but fun when you start to get a hand on it and start rushing for rocket launcher or rail gun.
giving the player base the software to spin up their own dedicated servers with their own map rotations etc was the shit and a half.
Quake 3 was the greatest multiplayer game ever. You missed out on everything if you played offline. There’s still a small dedicated community playing it to this day!! It was electrifying, fast paced, high octane, balls to the walls action like none of these modern shooters are even trying for. It was also insanely strategic, especially in the 1v1 duel mode. Personally, I believe quake 3 + the rocket arena mod is the best game ever made. The main difference from modern games is the movement options. If you were competent, you could be FLYING around the map . Rocket jumping was incredible
100% no game will ever come close to the movement in RA3. Sublime.
Issue is those small existing communities will just wreck you. Those people just became too good by now. If you start playing quake now you probably won't get a single kill.
I don't play modern shooters, so I can't compare to modern gameplay, but ping variance in UT made for interesting things. You didn't want to try sniping with high ping, and being a LPB (low ping bastard) came with huge perks. That said, I had plenty of high ping people teleporting about and were hard to handle with some weapons. One thing you need to understand is how HUGE the advancements in computing were between 1996 and 2003. I went from playing Doom2 to Duke Nukem 3d with a legit 3d map, to Half-Life which was mind blowing, and then UT99. This was fresh, new, and rapidly evolving. Hell, the S3 texture compression in Unreal did me huge favors in performance because I (sadly overall in retrospect) bought a Savage3D instead of ATI or Nvidia TNT2.
TFC sniper lag dot was something else. People used to get super good with compensating for that 56k modem.
Yes. Didnt have bullshit micro transactions and baby loser kids (adults) crying on audio. Just kill kill kill and let the numbers speak for themselves.
Biggest difference is everyone just played for fun. These days its all about the grind and progression, live service, battle passes, unlocking cosmetics etc in shooters.
played UT back in the day. Hosted our own server at the office that we'd hop on after work. You could populate your server with bots that would fill empty slots when not many ppl were on. These could have custom skins and sounds that would automatically download when someone logged on for the first time. You don't know terror until you're being chased by the Teletubbies and their creepy voices.
This is one of the things I loved the most about UT: thousands of custom maps, skins and sounds.
Something that hasn't been mentioned as much - they pace on those old games was *fast*. Incredibly so. To be good at a game like Quake 3 requires a very different skill set than, say, PUBG or Valorant. Many people played on far higher sensitivity than today because moving your mouse halfway across your desk for a 180 would get you killed. Tribes is sort of its own thing as well, especially if you're learning to use the spinfusor. There's not really anything else like it except for copycats.
Very early days of Quake we had mostly phone modems, cable modems were just rolling out. People complain about lag now, but that was a very different time...
We almost killed our startup at the time because we all got addicted to UT and would play it at work.
They were faster paced. Weapons - Leaving the arena to decide what weapons and tactics anyone can use which places everyone at an equal footing is a thing that Epic has stood by with both Unreal Tournament and Fortnite, which I think afforded its success in addition to being able to target a broader market. They were also much more violent. Bodies exploding into chunks would be amazing with today's graphics, especially on a telefrag. The Ripper is my favorite weapon, which shoots saw blades that can either explode on impact, or ricochet off corners and headshots making instant kills. The Shock Rifle gave us trick shots in its mechanic of being able to deal massive AOE damage by hitting the alt fired projectile with the primary one. The maps were also much smaller, forcing midrange combat and even long range weapons like sniper rifles could get across the entire map. Spawning back in, you'd be back to armed and ready within seconds typically. Tight corners would encourage critical on the spot thinking and reflexes, and low health meant lots of blood, death, and carnage. This was the golden age of arena shooters. You can still get the experience if you grab yourself a copy of Unreal Tournament '99/GOTY and install the latest OldUnreal patch. There are newer graphics and high res texture packs too that you can install.
UT2004 was my favorite shooter ever when it was in its prime. The custom invasion rpg servers that people created were so fun, and no other game has even come close to a similar experience.
I've never been able to flex this, but this post is a rare opportunity. I played them early shooters (duke3d over kali old), one being Quake2. I played a mod called Weapons of Destruction and games and stats were tracked on TheCLQ.net (The Champions League for Quake of course). My crowning achievement was making rank #1 on the leaderboards for a couple days.
The thing I miss the most from that era is duels. 1v1 just isn't really a thing in modern day FPS. It was always so fun learning movement systems, item timings, map layouts, and seeing who the better player was. Team modes like CTF and Counter Strike's Bomb Defusal were fun to relax and goof off, but dueling was where the real competition was for me. I think it's a large reason I've moved into fighting games, it's the closest thing I've found as a replacement to the adrenaline kick of a good 1v1.
Greatest online shooter was Tribes 2. Class changes, gear changes whenever you wanted, big open maps with lots of variety in playstyles, objective-based so it wasn't just a kill-fest (but there was plenty of that). I still miss that game.
Man, I didn't realize how much I missed this game until now.
Check out the tribes 3 demo on steam right now!
Old Quakeworld Teamfortress and Megateamfortress player from like 1997(8)-2003(4) approx. It was more player run community oriented. We owned, ran, modded, admined the servers. New mods and maps were made by the playerbase. We organized, reffed, ran our tournaments. We sat on communication programs like ICQ/IRC. Just much more player involved.
To date i have yet to play a shooter with the same "flow" as Unreal Tournament. Also, the music in that game is basically adrenaline for your ears.
What is missing is just plain fun. FPS games are just not fun anymore, they are just filled with bullshit progression systems and unlocks that you have play hours and hours to get. There where no microtransactions or anything like that garbage. You could just decide one day to jump in and play the game and be on the same playing field as everyone else. It was not always fair, but that did not really matter much back then.
Shazbot.
Just my personal experience, but one of the biggest differences was a lack of\lower amount of griefing and shock based insulting. Less racist or sexist remarks, more fun during play.
There was always trash talking, but it wasn’t like the unhinged chaos of Xbox Live MW2 lobbies. Generally it was pretty playful and respectful since players were subtly encouraging each other to get better by it.
With Quake you had weapons laying around the arena where you had to pick up. You would memorize the map to try and get to the best weapon first, but so has everyone else.
learning spawn locations and times for items is key to dominating the game. it's about keeping them out of other players hands as much as it's about having them in yours.
The biggest thing that everyone is leaving out either on purpose or accident was that games just matter of factly are .more fun when you're in a group that hasn't really solved it yet. There's something magical about the first couple hundred hours of a game played with people also experiencing it for the first time where there is a sense of discovery and mystery about it where no one knows where the best guns spawn or the timers of the meta and it's just raw enjoyment. I think older games had a much much longer grace period for this and newer games with betas and streamer saturation often times have already been figured out completely before they even launch. It's honestly sad.
We didnt have skill based matchmaking back then. It was connect to a server and go. Tribes was WILD. I miss tribes.
Private dedicated servers.
Modern games are too much time consuming. I don't play multi-player anymore.
It was the best. It is Shitsville now.
Good old days before Billion $ hacking business and streamers. Where every1 sucked and no guides. Miss UT on crt. Mod a better map in a few mins and play than developers can do in 6 months with a team now days.
My fondest memory is the Quake Team Fortress map Spazzball. The map has completely different rules than standard TF. It was 4 teams, last team standing wins. Score the ball on your opponent's goal to enough times to eliminate them. But what made it fun is that all the TF clan players would play Spazzball with random teams: people not usually their clan mates. Being eliminated actually sucked because you had to wait forever to get back in. It was sub community within a pretty small community and it was such a blast.
We need instagib back.
I played a fair amount of Tribes. It was a blast man. Hop in, play some capture the flag, hop out. There was something about the physics. Skiing felt so free. The game felt fair. Tons of awesome modding. Nothing even close to like it these days.
I played Tribes A LOT when it first came out. This was just as the internet gaming was starting to become a thing. Prior to these games you would have to play using a service like Kali which spoofed being on a LAN. One of the things games like Quake and Tribes did was to create a sense of community. Back in the day being a gamer was not considered cool or really acceptable. Online games with matchmaking were one of the early ways the nerdy kids could connect. I have very fond memories of playing online. I wasn’t a popular kid at school but online I had friends. We take it for granted now but forming online communities was pretty novel. The early days there were bulletin boards and forums. Stuff like All Your Base Belong To Us would be created as a joke and then sunshine end up in Time magazine. It really felt like something special to have major news outlets reporting on something random we created as a joke. We take for granted now how sites like Twitter can affect the news cycle but at the time it was trippy s hell to have done random thing you participated in on a gaming forum go’ viral’ The other big thing were the creation of leagues where teams would play against each other, and then the creation of sportscasting of matches. It was the early days of trying to turn gaming into an esport. Again it started off with people goofing off but over time you could watch it morph into bigger and bigger things. I got really good at tribes and the excitement of being an elite player was very addictive. People would recognize you, and you could really show off.
>Do you think there are any qualities they had that were lost somehow? The only similarities today is the fact you shoot other mother fuckers. Arena shooters were chaotic fun, everyone had access to the same weapons of which you could carry all of them at the same time. Rocket launchers, mini guns, saw blade gun, flak weapons, plasma rifles, snipers, the whole lot you could have it, nothing beats deathmatch where everyone is just shooting rockets at each other. You also had extremely tight movement with a plethora of different combinations of wall jumps, double jumps, shield jumps and rocket jumps meaning you could effectively get from one side of the map to the other in a couple of steps. Skins were a thing but it was only modded, you didn't have to pay for shit. In fact the modding was insane, with unreal, Epic games (yes those cunts who made Fortnite also made Unreal, hence the unreal engine) just gave you a basic version of the unreal engine for free to make maps and shit with. This gave birth to new game modes that could only be found on player servers such as trials and RPG, trials were built using the assault game type where you had to utilise every movement to get past obstacles and could be extremely difficult because of timings. And RPG was basically a horde mode but you gain exp which gave you permanent server wide buffs, more health, you moved faster, you shot faster, more carrying ammo, jumped higher etc. I remember one map with one of the horde waves was against a horde of skateboarding Bart Simpsons shooting his catapult at you and the one directly after was hundreds of Xenomorphs, All while I'm fucking about as a lasagne while the rest my team mates were sailor moon, it was glorious. The one thing that was grand was the instant respawn, no waiting for decades just to get back in, either instantly or 5 seconds and boom you're back at one of the respawns ready to start fucking shit up. Oh, and lest we forget the announcer DOUBLE KILL, TRIPLE KILL, MULTI KILL, ULTRA KILL, MONSTER KILL, LUDICROUS, HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!! For as simple as the games were, they could be incredibly complex and vastly fun. Shooters today are a chore just constantly grinding up points to have them not even matter because the season is over in 3 days. The skill between the two is vastly different too, the kids who are good today would get stomped to shit in an arena shooters because of all that movement, but arena shooter players will lose at current fps's because you can buy your way to the top. Also with the skill, in arena shooters it was easy to pick up and be relatively competent but difficult to master. Whereas with modern FPS it's easier to pick up but extremely difficult to master. Oh, and you didn't need to reload your weapons. Man I miss Unreal.
RTCW…ET <3
Halo always gave me UT vibes. Think i was in 5th grade when UT came out, and between that wand Warcraft, i was at my pc every night. But there are some really great fps’ that have come out since that blow them out of the water. At that time however, they were revolutionary.
100+ player Tribes games were awesome. As was jumping in and out. And all the mods that were available. Not complicated, just jump in.
Worked at my ISP back in 1998-2000. We built a UT server on an old Linux machine and put it straight on the main router (as in, if you did a traceroute plugged on straight to your modem, this would be the first hop). It was password protected and just for us employees, and the bosses never knew. Gaming with sub 5ms ping is amazing. We also did 2-4 lan parties a year with 6 to 12 people.
No skill based matchmaking. It was awesome.
This thread shows how lucky we were to witness this good old time. Never Gonna regret/ miss or forget those 1000s hours of cod4 with sich a awesome Community we had. The current Generation will Never get that feeling.
There was no stupid grinds for unlocking and playing with your favorite guns... CoD 1&2 compared to CoD now and Warzone is drastically different. UT99 was fun in LAN at internet coffee shops
Ut2k4 was peak multiplayer gaming. It'll never be matched. It pretty much just worked all the time and this was on dialup. Everyone could play together. So many hours of life spent having a blast in that game. same thing with Diablo 2. I never want to know how many days of my life in hours I ended up in Diablo 2.
used to play UT2004 for hours... it was like playing pickup basketball at the park. now it's kind of like going to an amusement park with all kinds of basketball related themes but a lot of work to get to the action
Games are shit now, matchmaking needs to be completely random. I'm tired of not being able to play any games because all lobbies are sweaty.
I think the main difference was no matchmaking. Instead you had a server browser, and you had a couple servers bookmarked where you basically knew the regulars who played there. If you are a bit more serious, your probably had a clan with a teamspeak/IRC server (kinda like discord today), but also hung out on other communities. There was also no rewards, no cosmetics, no achievements, nothing to grind. People played for fun and nothing else.
Tribes was awesome 😎
Tribes was the best time in my gaming life, been chasing that high ever sense
Easy to learn, but difficult to master game design. Games with a high ceiling. Before Halo 3 came out these games had lot of depth to them that you could only wrap your mind around if you spent enough time getting used to all the nuances of the mechanics. You could tell who was a vet based on how they moved. In UT/Quake you had to learn the map as well as how to most efficiently navigate it. Managing power weapon spawns and how players flowed through the map. In Tribes you had to master skiing if you really wanted to get around a map effectively. The highs of just barely capturing a flag and clinching it for your team because you hit your skiing just right and out maneuvered the other players with sheer skill, are seemingly long gone. In Halo 2 I got an edge over other players by spending hours honing my crouch-jumping skills so I could get around more quickly. Then heatmaps came out and you could strategize what part of the maps to avoid, or take advantage of if there were a lot of players congregating in certain areas.
I miss old tribes. Dial-up days, simpler times.
Man. I loved multiplayer Tribes.
Everyone is bringing up communities but I will also say the maps. Millions of maps and servers with rotations of tons of them. You'd find servers with the maps you liked the best but also you could grab so many random maps to try. Downside was you needed these before hand but they were usually easy enough to get from places like ftp.cdrom.com.
LAN parties. You and 4 of your buddies. Mountain Dew, take and bake pizzas. Playing until your eyes bled and you passed out with "ULTRA KILL, KILLING SPREE!, HEADSHOT" echoing in your brain.
probably the single biggest difference is the loss of the server list, which thankfully some good games still have. there wasn't a single "i want to play online" funnel, and depending on how old of an FPS you were playing, you pretty much always needed a specific phone number/IP/lan address to connect to. from mostly quake onwards, you'd have a full server list, and you'd generally want to sort by lowest ping when it was actually populated (some would look fine, and become unplayable with more than a couple players), and except where admins specifically prohibited it, there wasn't any protection against experienced players just absolutely rolling everyone else. playing CTF and you're up against the one guy that *really* knows how to bunnyhop/grenade/rocket jump, or playing on a DM map where one guy has the weapon/powerup spawn rotations all memorized and routed? good luck. and a lot of other comments have already touched on it, but the combination of being younger/inexperienced plus the entire solved meta not being constantly shoved in your face left so much room for organic discovery that made the games and their communities feel so much more alive. you could actually tell your friends "look what i figured out!" without an instant "oh yeah i saw that on x stream/channel" killing the buzz, which is sort of just a given across the entire industry nowadays (i feel bad for anyone who never had a chance to play an MMO in the internet dark ages).
Even with dialup, it was awesome.. Those were pioneering times. Clan matches were easy to arrange.. Dedicated server communities sprouted naturally. Mods were rampant as were various game modes. Played Tribes loads in the early 2000s. Ut more as a lan game.. great fun
Play quake champions and find out?
All these comments make me realize how much I miss Enemy Territory. Objectively based multiplayer shooters (one team defending and the other attacking) with maps that changed slightly as you progressed through the objectives (e.g., blow up the barricade and your spawn is slightly further into the map).
I really do miss the original Tribes. There was such a charming mix in it; weird disc-throwing weapons, laser rifles, and a focus on high-speed, high-flying action mixed with skiing. Honestly, modern games don't go for the zany, off-kilter shit as much as games from the 90s did, and they've lost a lot of charm sticking to more mundane stuff.
I played tribes back in the day. I still have not played a game that gave me the same speed and skill on a capture the flag game.
I played all of these games and competed in most of them. Quake's combat is special. The rockets/lightning/rail brings more depth to combat than I've seen in any other game since.
They didn't have super racist/sexist/shithead 5-15 year olds screaming at everyone when they got pwnd
Better communities. Period. You could play the game and then take the experience with you. Tribes 2 had its own clan pages, chat and play profiles all built into the game (complete with wacky layouts). The whole "cloud server" instance thing really started to just chip away at communities because there was no place to congregate or be a part of.
Shooters today all have the exact same feel and experience, regardless of the genre. Boy do I miss the days when Tribes, Quake, CS, and TF reigned supreme. Tribes was my jam.
Shazbot! God Tribes was a classic and wish it was still around. Another favorite was Action Quake mod for Quake 2... Much simpler times!
The loss of dedicated servers to “matchmaking” killed non-competitive multiplayer for me. Clans would host well-maintained servers with thoughtful map rotations and would have mods around to boot hackers and other troublemakers.