Pretty sad that most of our childhood consisted of trends that don't matter to the next generation of kids, like cartoons, board games, and arena shooters. None of these concepts will ever die, but they are mainly terrible nowadays
Arena shooters were so much fun because they were not really taken seriously. They were kind of like party games except you were shooting at people instead. Wish I got to experience LAN parties
Boomer shooters will always hold a special place in my heart thanks to my dad. He introduced me to DOOM, Quake, and Battlefield 1942 in 2002 (not an arena shooter, but still). To this day, every pc I ever get has these classics installed on them. Thanks, Dad, you’re a real one.
My dad introduced me to Halo CE, Duke Nukem 3D, Battlefield 2, Guild Wars, and Painkiller: Black Edition. He'd also play the N64 with me and my brother a lot and we'd play games like Perfect Dark, Battletanx, Resident Evil 2, Donkey Kong 64, and Starfox 64 on it. I'm so glad I held on to that n64 we had, and especially all the nintendo games I had for it, since nintendo just hates emulation so much. My dad and my brother and I still play games together every week, mostly Elder Scrolls Online and Battlefield 1.
Imagine if you will, An M rated “Republic commando 2:Order 66” With a Starwars/Doom soundtrack, where you’re hunting down Jedi remnants, killing rebels, blowing doors open while your visor cleans the blood off your HUD. All with a metal Starwars soundtrack playing, while SEV makes remarks about how he always wondered how hard it would be to kill a Jedi. You are now in, the Twilight zone
Look, I want this, EXTREMELY, but Star Wars post-disney is absolutely inaccessible to develop for, especially for more mature audiences. I SERIOUSLY want to be eating my own words here, but we're probably never going to get that brutal star wars we need.
I remember reading about arena shooter tournaments in the 90's where the winners won cash prizes. The idea that you could win money by playing your favorite game was mind-blowing to me as a kid
Fun fact, for some reason when you hit zombies in RE4 Remake you can hear... Orb's hurting sound? I don't know why devs thought that sound would be okay for a zombie, but yeah.
@@Flesjemetwater i've not actually tried quake champions, I might give it a crack, I didn't really like the look of the gameplay footage I'd seen before but does it play like old school quake?
@@c4scompsmith there are still pieces of unreal tournament in fortnite though. Some perks and buffs make the same sounds and there's a lobby song that's the song from a galactic capture the flag map.
Tribes also did something that was very true to that super high skill ceiling of traditional arena shooters that was also very different. Instead of bunny hopping at an angle like a drunken coke addict, it had something I can really only describe as "skiing". You had to use your jet pack, physics of your flying around, and then sliding around on hills to build up speed to borderline fly around the map even when not using the jet pack actively.
it's not something "you can only describe as" skiing, it's what everyone in the community called it. Learning to ski is an important part of playing Tribes
Man, this gives me good trips down memory lane. My brother and I getting dropped off at my friends house before school, and spending the early morning playing Halo 2 slayer matches with him and his little sister, really has to be some of my fondest childhood memories. Thank you for revitalizing, even for just a brief moment, one of the greatest eras of gaming.
Dusk and Ultrakill have been pretty succesful lately and show there's still interest in the genre, all my young friends from the new generations are discovering how fun this playstyle is thanks to them ^^
@@MILDMONSTER1234 Someone, at some point, will most definitely attempt to make a multiplayer ULTRAKILL mod. Given how many times Hakita has been asked if he plans to add it into the game and said no. It may be a long while, but never underestimate the modders.
I really want you to talk about Indie Games in the future. Games like Bug Fables, Pizza Tower, Celeste, ULTRAKILL, Madness: Project Nexus, etc. It would be a breath of fresh air from the AAA game news you bring personally.
I'm surprised you didn't talk about Unreal Tournament 2004, I remember playing that when I was young, it was amazing, even some of its maps like Convoy that even has a TF2 port version are amazing. Great video!
I wish he talked more about the new indie boomer shooter games. Games like Dusk, Ultrakill, Cultic have been some of my favourite from the past few years. The genre is not dead at all
@@thescrambler6354 Oh it was because act man was specifically saying that it was online arena shooters that have died and this guy here was talking about these arena shooter like games so I was confused if he meant the multiplayer. But it was probably him talking about the single player which is alive to this day for example like Doom
I never was alive when Doom 1-2 released but I love them a lot having experienced them years later. Especially Doom 2016 and Eternal. RIP these amazing Arena Shooters.
Yeah, absolutely, for some reason it is so underated. I find it as good as Duke, Quake and some others. Amazing FPS in every regard. Every person who loves these type of games should go and play it, it runs great on raze, i tried it a month ago, real smooth gameplay
Warhammer 40k Boltgun, Dusk, Project Warlock, Prodeus, Forgive me Father, Doom Eternal, Ultrakill, Postal Baron Damaged, Shadow Warrior 3. The genre is VERY much alive for single players experience, and arguably more so than it has been for the past 15 years.
Arena shooters refer to multiplayer shooters like Quake 3 where everyone spawns with the same weapons. Those are called boomer shooters not arena shooters
@@Legion849 Except he includes several games that have no multiplayer component in them. Dark Forces does not have a multiplayer mode. His definition of what an arena shooter even is is so nebulous and in flux. Many people consider Doom Eternal and Ultrakill to be arena shooters, since the games so heavily and unabashedly rely on arena combat. He could easily quantify this by including multiplayer in the title but just doesn't for some reason. Arena shooters as a genre have had some of their most successful releases in the past few years. The industry leaders just shifted towards Indie Developers, but still games like Dusk and Ultrakill are fantastic. Ultrakill is probably the best shooter ever made from a mechanical standpoint.
Arena shooters definitely fell off relevancy, but the boomer shooter genre is definitely going strong. New Blood Interactive is proving that there's still a die-hard passion for it. ULTRAKILL is one of those games I'm convinced is gonna appeal to a large audience once it gets out of Early Access, assuming it isnt appealing to a lot of people already.
They're making FPS games fun and Badass again. I mean, I never stopped playing this stuff, from Doom and Nukem 3D mods, to games made in GXdoom and EDuke32. Right now I'm dying to play the full release of Selaco, which feels like it has some Fear/Perfect Dark blood for a GZDoom game, with a presentation that felt like a more futuristic Ion Fury - which was also fucking awesome lol
I think people have the natural urge for things they like to be popular. I played and enjoyed ultrakill. But it's clearly dated game design and I guarantee it won't appeal to most people who have gotten in to shooters in the past 15 years or so. It's too fast and slippery and no matter how cute the robot fan art is, it just doesn't have mainstream appeal. The developers know who their audience is and it's clearly guys like you, my man. You're in the minority but that doesn't make the game any less awesome. Cheers dude!
@@BasicWorldbuilder At least to my understanding the original comments more so saying that the arena FPS (or its core formula) was/is making a comeback. DOOM 2016 would spark the peak of this return. ULTRAKILL (and Dusk and Amid Evil) hit this wave at its best. The comments not saying that ULTRAKILL is the most popular best game ever made but rather it's peak in popularity (and it's community today) show that the arena formula isn't dead and there's still an audience for it. DOOM 2016 proved people still like fast paced FPS games.
@@noodlebro6983 My response is really to the sentence I'm loosely quoting "im convinced ultrakill will appeal to a LARGE audience once it gets out of early access" and it simply won't. Counter-Strike has a large audience. Call of duty has a large audience. FORTNITE has a large audience. Tarkov, etc. And remember. I'm on your side here, I like the boomer shooter and arena shooter genre . But marketing is my job in the real world, I'm not naive and I know the arena /boomer shooter genre as a whole, is niche. Nothing wrong with that. I was simply disagreeing that it's going to appeal to a wide audience because I know it won't lol, Doom's biggest day ever couldnt get close to fortnite's worst day. And I don't even like fortnite .Those are just two data points but they show you the mountain that these type of shooters need to overcome if they want to ever be relevant again. If Doom can't do it. No one could, and that's okay if some developers want to keep making them. I'm sure people like us will keep buying them. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a niche product lol
I will say this right now, because Ultrakill became as popular and well received as it did. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more games inspired by Arena Shooters in the future.
I still remember the first time I played counter-strike, I was completely blown away. Still can't believe that was over 20 years ago and I still play 1.6 to this day. What a masterpiece and blessing to the first person shooter gaming community.
Quake 3 Arena is simply one of the best shooters ever made. The game is pure fun. That's it. No nonsense, just pure fun. It's painful that not many new gamers even know about how awesome it is.
It is awesome, but I think kids nowadays want more than just purely skill based games. I'm a teacher in real life, so I have good insight into what the kids play. Fortnite is still beyond huge, especially with younger teenagers. Of course, they play to win as well, but they also play to unlock new cosmetics, hang out with friends online or just mess around. You can't play a game like Q3 with that mindset. And honestly, some kids still get into competitive games like CS:GO. But most of them aren't. Gaming as a whole is much larger than it was when Q3 was a thing. It used to be a nerd thing. Today, it's just another hobby, just like sports.
@@chrissennfelder7249 CSGO itself is fairly dumbed down in terms of movement when compared to the old CS games. That's an attempt to appeal to casual gamers.
I only recently got into mouse & keyboard FPS gaming and I downloaded Quake Champions and I gotta say, arena FPS games are something special. The fast pace, the insane movement capabilities, the emphasis on really great mechanics, it's all exactly what I want out of an FPS game. I just wish more people played them.
I personally think that console games dumbed down FPS games a lot in many ways (slowing characters down, punishing the player for even attempting to move fast/in an unintended way, reducing the arsenal of the player to only 2 weapons thus making every fight pretty much the same most of the time) but I'm not saying this because I hate consoles or because I hate console games I simply hated that every company decided to water down their games after Halo CE and CoD trying to follow the trend and trying to imitate what made these games great and now 90% of AAA FPS are like them but failing to replicate what made them so great back in the days... they're all slow and predictable now.
Modern FPS games are ultra-casual and designed around maximizing revenue. If you've grown beyond those games there isn't much else out there to play. The only notable FPS game in the past 5 years would be Gundam Evolution and that's a hero shooter.
Its a genre that I want back in the mainstream so bad, especially the multiplayer portions. I was born far too late to see the peak of such an awesome style of game. Movement in shooters is by far my favorite aspect, so I have these games to thank for it. They're probably better off gone from the mainstream because they would have been ruined entirely by now.
We got some good callbacks like duke nukem with Ion Fury and Phantom Fury, and black mesa imo did a great job on the half life mp, and quake champions is decent.. but yeah its a genre we need back
My favorite moment in Doom 2016 was in multiplayer where my buddy dodged a rocket by hip thrusting via emote He thrusted at just the right time for it to swerve him It was magical
@@sebastianalarcon7986 Alright, I agree. I guess what I had in mind was a map, where people run around and challenge others for a dance-off and loser get eliminated. A Dance Battle Royale, maybe. Map has items which can give you score multipliers. Haha
I had fun playing through the campaign, I was a bit disappointed though because it felt unfinished. I see a lot of potential in Prodeus and I hope the devs put all their blood and sweat into that game because I want to play a good arena shooter that hasn't been around for 20 years
The first game i ever played was Wolfenstein on PC while sitting on my mom’s lap in 1998. Watching her play Starwars, Wolfenstein, and Tomb Raider is the reason i’ve got such a deep love for classics like those games
I really got into the multiplayer of doom 2016 when it came out. I found running a loadout of super shotgun and normal pump shotgun was absolutely broken because you could shoot one, swap to other, shoot it, swap back, repeat and it would absolutely destroy people.
@@hollow_w33n a souls youtuber named oroboro made a montage of it and thats how I discovered it. You can probably find it by searching oroboro doom 2016 shotgun or something and youll see exactly what I mean
There was a re-release of quake and the multiplayer was going pretty well.. havent checked it for a while so I can only hope the population didnt drip off hard.
@@SkyTied nope the first quake, I had the original one on steam so I got the new one for free which includes a ton of settings and visual modifiers as well as includes expansions if I remember correctly.
I just got into playing Unreal for the first time lately, and after trying out Unreal Tournament for the first time with a few friends I can definitely see why. Coming mostly from Valve titles it feels like a totally new world that I hadn't discovered, yet also very familiar and so much fun in both single player and multiplayer.
I think you should mention the transition from server browser and dedicated servers to matchmaking. I think it had huge impact not only on the genre but whole industry and community around it. Modability and custom servers are a rarity right now.
Matchmaking is pretty bad in every single game that has used it as a main feature in my experience. I can't say for certain obviously, but I'm pretty sure actual gamers from console and PC are getting tired of the current trends. Not long till big companies catch on, hopefully. Valve might be paying attention as well. Lets be honest they get so much info from Steam based on reviews, player count, and playtime. Like of all the major companies I think they might have the best grasp of what players actually want because they have literally herded tons of PC gamers into their own ecosystem where they can straight up analyze us. It would be silly of them not to capitalize on that.
That mention of Time splitters series is golden man!!! It's underrated and underappreited in the mid-life cycle of FPS history. Thank you Act Man you trully are a man of culture.
Timesplitters 2 is personally my favorite game of all time. The amount of characters and the unique selections , not to mention map creator, the tough af challenges, the goofiness… man, that game is legendary. The franchise albeit
playing the OG’s (quake, duke nukem 3D, doom, jedi knight) with my dad is one of my favorite childhood memories. these games always have a spot in my heart!
I'm glad you made the comparison-ish to fighting games because its kinda true for both; there's a big skill gap in both genres. I used to play against bots in UT3 and had a blast. Once I jumped in VS live opponents, it became so clear that I had some learning to do; even someone on the other team asked if it was my first time.
i think its actually a kind of disingenuous take, considering how arena shooters have more complex mechanics compared to a special move in a fighting game, it doesnt even make sense
@@thatonecrazykobold1729 ? What lol. Arena shooters, like fighting games have one cheap, yet rewarding gimmick. They are DECEPTIVELY simple. It looks easy to zoom around in Quake 3, pull off combos in SSBU, but it's not. It is a truly laborious process to even get close to comfort, let alone mastery in either of these two genres. And if you think you've figured it out... Hop online, and bring some damn Kleenex.
@@PapaJoJ What do you mean aim assist !? , Talk about irrelevant stupidity , The whole point is that Act-moron didn’t do a single research about the hundreds if not thousands of Arena shooters in the market yet claim that the genre is dead , What does aim assist has to do with the video !?
Thank for the trip down memory lane, it's nice to indulge in some childhood nostalgia and happy memories early gaming brought me. Anyone who grew up in those times - you should know we lived in an era that can never be recaptured or restored, and can never be surpassed but only rivaled. We lived in the golden era of gaming - a cultural zeitgeist as gaming entered mainstream.
I wouldn't say that honestly. Back then i hated a lot of the games listed in the video and or didn't know them since i was born in 2000. Doom was cool but i never played the multiplayer, same for quake, i like quake but that multiplayer looks hair-pullingly frustrating to learn. Halo is cool but it isn't a hardcore arena shooter like the others even though i still see it like that. I never heard of Unreal, played Tribes Ascend on pc a couple times but no matter what all these games ended the same for me. Getting stomped by people who were better then me and never having fun because of it. And if someone says just get better at the game, i tried that for 8 years and it got me nowhere.
@@thememeilator2633 if you were born in late 80s or early 90s you’d say this otherwise. You definitely missed out on the golden era since you were too young unfortunately. The internet itself was just much different too which also affected the way we online gamed
@@donnieb390 well i dunno. My first game i ever played was Majora's mask on the N64. I grew up on nintendo games mostly and got into shooters around when i was 13 on the PS3. Games like Crisis 2. Plus you should know that my generation cares more about winning then actually having fun in these kind of games, thats why we fell out of them mostly. Our mentality was essentially "win to be better and be better to win" and a LOT of us fell out of the challenge because of it. I have my own recounting of the time from my perspective if you wanna read it. Edit: i should clarify that nowadays i am not like that when it comes to shooters and gaming as a whole. I love almost every game i play truly and i'm far from the toxic ball of angst and emotions i use to be.
Doom Eternal is the greatest gaming experience I had in a very, very long time, it brought me back to my childhood and I'm grateful to Id for sticking to their guns and giving us one of the greatest games ever.
100% , i think it might be my favorite game ever tbh, just due to it's incredible combat loop. It is also probably one of the only solo games i ever played that matched a multiplayer's intensity. Playing master levels on nightmare, quickswapping and comboing your way through all these demons is absolutely unmatchable. Sadly, i think the combat isn't really applicable to a multiplayer mode..
@@rooxg Tbh, I have never really care for multiplayer in games, so if the multiplayer in a game is subpar o great I really couldn't care less, good chance I'll never touch it. I understand that multi is really, really important for many or most people, but for me personally, I come from the age of goldeneye and halo split-screen deathmatches, if I'm not in the same room with my friends shitposting and bullying each other, is not worth it and I don't care about online communities, if I'm going to play with my friends, I would rather go to a friends house, play some boardgames and have the peer to peer interaction irl imho.
The soundtrack for Doom is simply the greatest video game ost I’ve ever listened to. The shear metal and power you feel out of it gets you pumped every time and my god Doomguy looks like a beast.
The nostalgia I feel for arena shooters is more second hand, as I spent my formative years watching my father play those games back in the 90s, being 6 years old watching him bust up head crabs is one of the best memory from those days. Watching him have fun with FPS games was how I got into gaming myself and so I owe a lot of my love to the legacy of old school arena shooters.
I've watched the video a couple of times, and I get the feeling that you don't really understand what an arena shooter is. Half the games you mentioned and showed in the video are not arena shooters, they just had multiplayer mods that happened to be afps, the fact that Half-Life had DMC (which was a mod) doesn't mean that Half-Life is an arena shooter. No one remembers Half-Life because of the dmc mod. You also rushed Quake which is basically the most important game while talking about afps, and just briefly mention Unreal Tournament. I understand trying to contextualize how other sub-genres played a role in "killing" afps, but I just don't understand how in a 33 minutes video supposedly about afps, mentions and discussion points about actual afps can be counted on the fingers of a hand. I personally also don't believe that other shooters were the cause of death for afps, i think it's just because more people got into gaming and most of them weren't and aren't willing to "get good" at games that are purely skill based. The average player just want the quick dopamine hit that getting a victory royale in Fortnite or winning a match in CoD gives, or they want to feel good in "esports competitive" games like Valorant or Apex.
@@K4inan Not at all lol, battle royale are the literal opposite of "adrenaline". There is no adrenaline in spending 10 minutes looting and ratting just to hopefully get some fights in the last minute of a match. They are just more accessible compared to other FPS because they are thought from the ground up for the new kind of public I mentioned in my original comment. AFPS feels harder to most simply because they are JUST skill based, and if you want to "rank up" you ACTUALLY have to get good. In Apex for example, until very recently all you had to do to "get good" was literally just play a lot. That said AFPS are not hard per se, all you have to do in an AFPS is to literally just hold W, jump and shoot. They just require a little more effort to be mastered because the genre came out when games were actually made to be played and not to milk money out of the players with skins and battlepasses, so the gameplay HAD to be hooking to retain players.
@@K4inan Sounds like you are projecting hard not gonna lie! You most likely never played an Arena shooter and the biggest concept of "adrenaline" you have is looting in Tomato Town.
I honestly don’t see anything wrong with that, casual experiences are better, especially for those of us in our 30’s and 40’s who have more responsibilities and don’t have as much free time to become an expert at the game
Dude, I genuinely loved the Doom 2016 multiplayer. It was a blast once you learned the maps a bit. Once you figured out which demon and weapons you were the most effective with, it was a ton of fun. I forgot there were emotes though haha. I was for sure one of the few disappointed people when Eternal tried to do its own thing with multiplayer instead of good old deathmatch. I feel like deathmatch should always be on every Doom game. I mean, John Romero coined the phrase. Dropping deathmatch just feels wrong. Fingers crossed for the future though 🤞
A lot of games seem to be phasing out or just doing the bare minimum deathmatch modes, it's really sad. There are exceptions, but generally I like a simple deathmatch over anything else.
@@winlover37 Agreed. Deathmatch was certainly put on the back burner back when all the battle royale games started bringing in a ton of players. I don’t have the patience for a BR game. Deathmatch is nice because when you die, you just respawn and immediately go again. When you die in a BR, the time you spent playing is essentially wasted, and you have to start all over again. I’d rather just jump into a fast-paced game and have fun rather than playing something that is basically the definition of insanity.
I agree too. Even though 2016 had loadouts it was still otherwise an Arena multiplayer with it's health pickups, armor pickups, ammo pickups, power weapon spawns, and powerup spawns (which would include the demon spawn too). Act Man is on crack for saying that it sucked ass, its MP was fun as shit and just needed key changes going into Doom Eternal (though iD chickened out on doom eternal arena multiplayer)
I'm going to show this to my dad, I been reviving my old consoles (ps3 and gamecube) for us to relive the unreal tournament and turok days. And he asked me why did they stop making unreal tournament. You gave me a answer I can give him. Thank you.
Unreal tournament was super cool because it wasn’t very difficult so you could play with friends who aren’t gamers, your s/o or even your parents. It was like the Mario kart of classic arena shooters.
And Epic just Thanos snapped it out of existence - pulled all of the Unreal games from storefronts (even the single player ones) and shut down the servers so you can never play them again. I honestly despise the direction Epic took as a company once Fortnite blew up.
@@qu1253 they want to be Valve , develop engines and a distribution platform , god help us let's hope they don't try to make a console next... Edit; Valve would never delete legacy titles.
@@qu1253 Not true! You can still play UT 1999 online with the Unreal Tournament Community Patch! :D It also adds resolution settings for modern monitors. You just have to get the game itself from...somewhere...since you can't buy it anymore, if you catch my drift.
I still say it to this day, no matter how complex modern games have become in terms of their competitive aspect, none have ever trumped the spectacle of skill in arena shooters. The skill level in competitive unreal tournament matches was so unbelievably insane that you'd think all of them were using aimbot. You had to be skilled not only in aiming and shooting, but have perfect spatial awareness and reflexes. Watching someone pull split-second tricks to frag multiple people around the map while 90s jungle drum and bass is blasting in the background is just something id like to see again.
❤Unreal Tournament my beloved ❤ UT99 will always have a place in my heart, it's not only the best arena shooter ever conceived (imo) but it's also one of my favourite games in existence. From its maps, music, and weapons, you can tell there is much love poured into it. It's a shame that Fortnite's huge success massacred any idea of finishing UT's remake, however I do enjoy Fortnite now that zero construction is a thing, and since it brings so much joy into today's players, maybe those kids will be nostalgic about it in the future, talking about how most games in 2045 "just don't get it". You did an amazing retrospective; good job my man.
My best gaming memories were with Halo. 16 person LAN parties every weekend for 2 years straight, playing 12 hours per day. RIP LAN parties. You will be missed
Dude I'm 32 and have the same group of friends from school. Now and again when we have time we still meet up at one of our houses for a LAN sesh! We all bring our TVs and consoles and stuff. Pizza and gaming. It's awesome.
I remember in 2016 in High School, this kid managed to get halo ce on a thumbdrive and was able to copy it to everyone elses thumbdrives. All the kids had got it copied from each other, and a shit ton of us were playing halo with each other. Full big team battles. And the best part was how cool our school was, because they allowed us to play it even when they caught wind of it. They allowed us outside of lecture times to play it with each other. Whether in study hall, lunch, or a bit after school until the faculty left. It was great. All the kids were trash talking each other, and it made me feel so good due to being a very decent halo player, wiping the floor with people. It was an amazing memory of high school. Because despite being a server based matchmaking with each other, we were all next to each other, making it feel like a LAN party. I miss those days! I hope schools are still that cool with their students allowing them the joy of playing video games with each other.
Damn man, I came into the multiplayer area when it was a little to late for the Arena Shooters, but I've got to say that there's one game that, for me, is a dream come true: Unreal Tournament 3. It really had all of it: great and smooth gameplay, game modes, vehicles, a pretty ok story and the engine to make whatever you want with it. To bad we don't see such complete packages of games now-a-days.
what about ut2004 ? its has everything copied from ut3 and more. its just the same but more of it. actually, i consider it the best arena shooter ever. excellent scaleable bots and tons of maps. looks ok and plays awesome. still on my harddrive. its on steam btw and if you want humans to play with i think its your best option.
@@syrales5539 I have seen it, but somehow, the first UT I've got into was UT3. And the gameplay and graphics blew me away then. Even now I consider it a good game in these departments
Act Man, I love your content. Been watching you for years now and what I really appreciate is that your style of editing, and timing has grown and improved without you losing a single ounce of what made your channel so charming in the first place. Always look forward to Act Man content!
Saying a genre is dead because it does not appeal to the masses is one thing. However, there are many die hard communities keeping the AFPS alive. I can still get games nightly in various games and many Discords are dedicated to organizing game nights. So yes, dead in a sense that a developer may not take on a new AFPS, but the old school games we love are very much alive because of the gamers dedicated to keeping them alive. Xonotic and Quake are great examples.
AFPS are on life support. Discord game nights don't keep the game alive, they only serve as a way to get the remaining player together before the game is eventually fully dead. QC is the closest traditional AFPS to being alive, and it still has unreasonable que times for people outside Europe. Outside of that, Halo already showed that if the genre wants to achieve any popularity, it needs to be streamlined and simplified in every way possible, to a point where it's barely even recognisable. Coping that the games are "alive" is just a delusional way to ignore/deny that there is zero interest in these games from players and developers, despite most AFPS being shining examples of well-designed, competitive FPS with a massive amount of skill expression and depth.
28:38 here talks how many of the arena shooters is steal with many people and very much alive but not as many fractions or importance of before, and today with games like csgo.
Mainly because it hit its limit. Not just in its playerbase who will truly stay on for that gameplay loop, but also for its devs who had 0 idea how to handle what they had just launched and accomplished. It was spaghetti code of a couple of dorm students that caught a wave. It just didn't have any more room to grow without immense diminishing returns.
Splitgate failed because of the garbage matchmaking. They threw in bots into the matchmaking to make it feel like you were good at the game. Reality hits when you joined a match with all human players and you don't play nearly as good.
@jffry890 yeah I recently finished the campaign for gears 5 that I started in 2019. IT was rough as well havent even bothered touching Horde but I believe you
Same, I had always played games before, but it's during those years that I really got hooked. Cod 4 and Gears, were the games that really drew me in. Then went on to other games, L4D, Fallout. Hell in HS I would play Quake during lunch, we had a cool teacher who would let us into the computer labs, and a bunch of my friends would hop on and have mini tournaments or just ffa. What a blast.
I never heard anything good about those game save for Halo 3. CoD4 was toxic beyond belief and the same goes for GoW. No matter how good those games actually are they will be forever ruined for me due to the fanbase's being so ungodly toxic.
Quake Champs is amazing. Still has more support than most popular fpses lol. And that’s with a solid 400 players on a great day. Been playing and hanging with the best.
Unreal Tournament really was amazing for its time. It had great music, awesome maps & modes, cool mutators, and fun weapons. To top it all off the bots were pretty badass and fun to play against if you had crappy dial-up and couldn't play against other people.
Bro, i love your work and in my opinion, i think you should work more on the titles of your videos, i mean, i watched almost all your videos (that most interested me) before this comment, and i came here to watch the "lest interesting ones" IMO, only to find out that this is one of your best videos! because of the Netflix 6 episode gaming documentary High Score (2020), i've already gained more insight about the history of gaming, and this video is so underrated because it summarizes how FPS was born, How multiplayer games were born, and with even more details than the documentary itself. love your videos Act Man, the way you are unbiased and the creativity of your videos, you're basically the youtuber that most relates to me in this platform, and to think that ive found your channel this year browsing through reactions of my favorite game of all time, RDR2, "while searching for gold, ive found a diamond!" hats off, you have my respect! (Unrelated) PS: the whole Quantum fiasco and how you handled it, with the Ace Attorney videos and how you exposed this platform flaws, i consider it a masterpiece in your Act Saga. (also sorry if i made some grammar mistakes along the "newspaper article" i just wrote, but in my defense, I'm from Mozambique, a country in Africa, and our main language is Portuguese) keep up the good work and never stop being yourself!
At first I was concerned you were going to be pulling most of this essay from Errant Signal's history of FPS/Children of Doom series, but after hitting the midpoint I was pleasantly surprised to see you expand beyond that. Like a good college essay, you took your sources/inspirations and synergized them into something new that says something interesting and unique.
I grew up with Doom and Unreal Tournament 99 and I still keep them on all my computers and actively play them. I love those games, to the point that I even homebrewed my Nintendo 3DS so I could play Quake and Quake 3 when I'm out of my house. Metroid Prime Hunters also counts~
I'll never forget the triumph that was Unreal Tournament, specially 99 and 04. Not only surpassing most games in weapons, maps and modifiers, but also pioneering enemy AI like no other game in the genre. It's truly a testament of what easy to learn hard to master actually means. Sadly, it was treated poorly and there's no Steam versions for the OG games. Things like that begs the question of whether or not piracy is a valid way to preserve old games.
@@MS-du7ue By all acounts, if there's no legitimate way for you to play those games, feel no shame in getting those games by other mediums. Epic Games took those experience from many players, even if they legally own them.
I'm really glad I got to experience all these games in their prime. I've got so many fond memories of playing games like Duke3D, Unreal Tournament, Quake, Medal of Honor, etc. Great video dude!
That was mostly the reasons why i disliked them back then. as a kid i jus wanted to be good at them and nothing else so i could have fun in the game but the skill ceiling was too high for me which lead to me just being angry a lot. i usually don`t like being bad at something and try hard to learn it but end up never feeling satisfied or good when i actually do learn something i wanted to learn. put that on repeat for 8 years and you have my childhood experience with Arena Shooters.
@@anaguma90 not wrong. I sucked at those games and no matter how hard i tried i never got better at them until i stopped caring about them all together.
Unreal Tournament and Tribes were some of my favorites! Edit: Man the nostalgia in this video is unreal! Miss the days when Medal of Honor reigned supreme. Playing Rising Sun and Halo with some Starwars Battlefront, Counter Strike on the OG Xbox was life back in the day!
I LOVED splitgate, when it came out I sat through the 2 hour queue times with anticipation! I still can't believe such a small indie studio made such a great game and can't wait for the sequel
It was fun. It lacked content and I soon got bored with it. I only put 3 hours into the game. Also knowing that majority of the people I was fighting was AI didn't help. I don't feel the same unless I frag an actual person.
I very much miss the Unreal Tournament and Duke Nukem days. Linking playstations together and networking a bunch of ancient PC's was one of the best experiences of my life. Words cant do it justice.
Some of that Quake content shown was newly added content along with new HDR lighting (or was it ray tracing?) and an overhaul to the matchmaking menus. Pretty sure we were using Gamespy back then, not really what we had back in the day. Great video, 90% of these games are still worth playing today. I never stopped playing Counter-Strike 1.6. Long live the king!
Unreal Tournament was probably the first fps game I played and it absolutely blew me away. It still is a ton of fun. They should bring back that series.
That series is gone, Cliffy B and Epic decided they wanted to scuttle the entire ship so they could focus on making Gears of War, a series that didn't come close to what UT was
@@StoneTheCr0w “I’m older than you and was there at release so that means I’m right in every way” ok dick. And what he said was true,they were making a UT game in 2014,and it’s not unrealistic to think they would take people off of that project to work on Fortnite. And if they were so big on gears,then why did they abandon it?
Nobody called them "Arena Shooters" at the height of their popularity. And I think the contemporary definition is a corruption of the original definition of "Arena Shooter" which really started with Painkiller. They were just FPSes. Single or Multi-player. That was it.
Quake Champions is prety much playable. But as was said in the video, you need to invest time to (re)learn bunnhops and game mechanics. (Movement guide ruclips.net/video/7oOLk-1zShY/видео.html )
I do play QC from time to time since it released! But most of the time I see the same people in every game and there’s always that one dude on each team who has 50 kills while everyone else has 4-5 kills each lmao.
RIP Unreal Tournament, my favorite FPS of all time, specially UT2004. The learning curve wasn't super steep but the mastery curve was taller than Everest, truly one of a kind type of game. Sad Epic shelved it so hard that straight up stopped development to reallocate resources to Fortnite, and even later had the audacity to close the servers. UT was the foundation of Epic Games and they killed it. Thank you for making this video, bringing light to this wonderful genre
@@ShrekShrooms No, closing servers and not being able to buy the games anymore is. IDK what Epic is even trying to do by de-listing most Unreal titles. And yes, that includes the single player components.
I'm a little bummed that you didn't mention Unreal Tournament 2004 by name, that was in my mind that final blast/hurrah of Arena Shooters and is still a fully playable (if delisted) game today.
I have never played shooters, but I have fond memories of watching my brother play Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein... Watching this really sends home how big the 90s were for video games. Thank you for all your hard work Mr. Man. I really enjoy your videos, even of games I will never play.
Hmm. I always thought Counter-Strike was an Arena shooter though? And it certainly hasn't fallen? Or am I wrong on what kind of game it is? Is it just purely an FPS? Still early in the video so that might get answered later.
Act man proves once again why he is a master game commentary channel in this space...its truly dad to see something that used to be so big and popular fall off but hopefully this can lead to bigger and better things
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
RIP Arena Shooters. You will not be forgotten
RIP.
F
U
RIP especially to the goat Duke Nukem
Pretty sad that most of our childhood consisted of trends that don't matter to the next generation of kids, like cartoons, board games, and arena shooters. None of these concepts will ever die, but they are mainly terrible nowadays
Arena shooters were so much fun because they were not really taken seriously. They were kind of like party games except you were shooting at people instead. Wish I got to experience LAN parties
Agree dude today's shooter games don't do crazy stuff like fighting demons or fighting in crazy places like a lava room or in space
Totally agree. And the arena shooters died because they focused too much on eSports and lost it's goofiness.
There was some super serious Quake servers and players, some ladders etc
Quake Live??
pretty much yeah
you aren't expected by anyone to play well, nor to win every time, you're just there to play the video game, just like everyone else
Boomer shooters will always hold a special place in my heart thanks to my dad. He introduced me to DOOM, Quake, and Battlefield 1942 in 2002 (not an arena shooter, but still). To this day, every pc I ever get has these classics installed on them. Thanks, Dad, you’re a real one.
You have a dad that everyone would want
I still play the original Doom and Quake. They're classics that are still fun.
your dad sounds cool af, those are great memories to have :)
My dad was similar. He played Quake and Halo PC with me back in the day. Also loved Zelda. Now he doesn't really play anymore.
My dad introduced me to Halo CE, Duke Nukem 3D, Battlefield 2, Guild Wars, and Painkiller: Black Edition. He'd also play the N64 with me and my brother a lot and we'd play games like Perfect Dark, Battletanx, Resident Evil 2, Donkey Kong 64, and Starfox 64 on it. I'm so glad I held on to that n64 we had, and especially all the nintendo games I had for it, since nintendo just hates emulation so much. My dad and my brother and I still play games together every week, mostly Elder Scrolls Online and Battlefield 1.
This video is literally my childhood growing up playing video games, the amount of nostalgia I'm feeling right now is unbelievable
Obligatory "nostalgia" comment
Everyone's a Nostalgia Critic.
Imagine if you will,
An M rated
“Republic commando 2:Order 66”
With a Starwars/Doom soundtrack, where you’re hunting down Jedi remnants, killing rebels, blowing doors open while your visor cleans the blood off your HUD. All with a metal Starwars soundtrack playing, while SEV makes remarks about how he always wondered how hard it would be to kill a Jedi.
You are now in, the Twilight zone
I'd buy that day one.
@@wairen5020 i’d preorder the hell out of it
Look, I want this, EXTREMELY, but Star Wars post-disney is absolutely inaccessible to develop for, especially for more mature audiences. I SERIOUSLY want to be eating my own words here, but we're probably never going to get that brutal star wars we need.
I remember reading about arena shooter tournaments in the 90's where the winners won cash prizes. The idea that you could win money by playing your favorite game was mind-blowing to me as a kid
Quake 3 literally got me into gaming as a little kid, so the Quake series and arena shooters always had a special place in my heart
Quake 3 arena omg the memories 😢
@@yousefalbarq3271 Play quake live bro :)
Fun fact, for some reason when you hit zombies in RE4 Remake you can hear... Orb's hurting sound? I don't know why devs thought that sound would be okay for a zombie, but yeah.
Let's all revive quake champions?
@@Flesjemetwater i've not actually tried quake champions, I might give it a crack, I didn't really like the look of the gameplay footage I'd seen before but does it play like old school quake?
Doom, half-life, quake, unreal and most of the others will always hold a place in my heart.
Unreal Tournament was the first arena shooter I ever played, it's also the game that got me in to PC gaming in general. So many fond memories.
Same here, watching my dad play on Phobos and Turbine drew my imagination in like nothing else at the time
lol quake 3 came out two weeks later and this game died.
I'm so heart broken epic gave up on unreal tournament...
@@c4scompsmith there are still pieces of unreal tournament in fortnite though.
Some perks and buffs make the same sounds and there's a lobby song that's the song from a galactic capture the flag map.
I played them both but UT was better than Quake, overall.
Tribes also did something that was very true to that super high skill ceiling of traditional arena shooters that was also very different. Instead of bunny hopping at an angle like a drunken coke addict, it had something I can really only describe as "skiing". You had to use your jet pack, physics of your flying around, and then sliding around on hills to build up speed to borderline fly around the map even when not using the jet pack actively.
In Tribes 2 I was a spinfusor god
VGCS Shazbot!
it's not something "you can only describe as" skiing, it's what everyone in the community called it. Learning to ski is an important part of playing Tribes
I played Tribes Ascend many years ago. Didn't really get into it. Got intimidated by high skill gameplay and never touched it again
@@thememeilator2633 i enjoyed TA back in the day. was fun until a new company bought it and ran it into the ground inside of a year
@@LordButtsauce hmm well just another thing on the checklist i need to fix when i buy it
Man, this gives me good trips down memory lane. My brother and I getting dropped off at my friends house before school, and spending the early morning playing Halo 2 slayer matches with him and his little sister, really has to be some of my fondest childhood memories. Thank you for revitalizing, even for just a brief moment, one of the greatest eras of gaming.
Dusk and Ultrakill have been pretty succesful lately and show there's still interest in the genre, all my young friends from the new generations are discovering how fun this playstyle is thanks to them ^^
Yeah but that’s cause of the single player not the multiplayer which UK doesn’t even have
@@MILDMONSTER1234 Doom was initially single player so its still ok, as long as the genre is not forgotten
@@MILDMONSTER1234 Someone, at some point, will most definitely attempt to make a multiplayer ULTRAKILL mod. Given how many times Hakita has been asked if he plans to add it into the game and said no. It may be a long while, but never underestimate the modders.
@@thelosttraveler5808 yeah but when people think of arena shooters what they basiclLy mean is multiplayer boomer shooters
neither of those are arena shooters?
I really want you to talk about Indie Games in the future. Games like Bug Fables, Pizza Tower, Celeste, ULTRAKILL, Madness: Project Nexus, etc. It would be a breath of fresh air from the AAA game news you bring personally.
I'm surprised you didn't talk about Unreal Tournament 2004, I remember playing that when I was young, it was amazing, even some of its maps like Convoy that even has a TF2 port version are amazing. Great video!
Goated game
Yesssss Convoy was awesome!!
Assault mode in general was awesome :)
If you thought convoy was fun then you should have played on wacky map servers like Nachos & Beer.
OG UT2k4 demo soapnet server loiterer here. NOW U HAVE SOAP IN UR EYES
I miss these Rise and Fall video formats. Glad to see it return.
Imagine a Rise and Fall documentary video about the “Rise and Fall video format”
@@NikoPeludo And that will be the last video of that format
@@NikoPeludo what about fall and rise of rise and fall formats?
I wish he talked more about the new indie boomer shooter games. Games like Dusk, Ultrakill, Cultic have been some of my favourite from the past few years. The genre is not dead at all
Multiplayer isn't that alive
Im sad project warlock is not getting recommended by most comments.
@@at0mic354 and?
@@thescrambler6354 Oh it was because act man was specifically saying that it was online arena shooters that have died and this guy here was talking about these arena shooter like games so I was confused if he meant the multiplayer. But it was probably him talking about the single player which is alive to this day for example like Doom
Ultrakill isn't an arena shooter lol.
I have been struggling with depression for awhile now because of this damn cancer but u always manage to make me feel better
Hope you get better soon 🙏
I never was alive when Doom 1-2 released but I love them a lot having experienced them years later. Especially Doom 2016 and Eternal. RIP these amazing Arena Shooters.
Saying “never was” instead of “wasn’t” is killing me lol. Almost implies you’ve said this before and no one believed you
@@jarodandrews7425 "I wasn't alive when the game was released."
Them: "You look like you're older than me!"
"Looks can be decieving."
whaaaat?? How were you not alive during Doom 1 and 2? I was!
Just try to be alive next time bro, and you'll never skip Doom 1-2 release
@@pdpMASTERP I’m 21, turning 22 this June.
Cool to see you go In depth into this genre of shooters! Out of Curiosity, is ULTRAKILL on your radar at all? I think you might quite enjoy it.
"I do NOT have Daddy Issues! I AM PAPA'S SPECIAL FUCKING *BOY!!!!* " 😂
First thing that popped into my mind reading this lol. Sorry.
@@ThePhoenixScribe why?
@@wallacejenkins4747 you should watch maxor
@@wallacejenkins4747 Cause of Maxor
Took me a while to beat pissypiss
DOOM, Duke, Shadow Warrior, Quake, Perfect Dark Zero, Golden Eye, Halo 2, Half-Life, Serious Sam. All blew my mind. Good times.
Where's Blood???
Yeah, absolutely, for some reason it is so underated. I find it as good as Duke, Quake and some others. Amazing FPS in every regard. Every person who loves these type of games should go and play it, it runs great on raze, i tried it a month ago, real smooth gameplay
Unreal Tournament?
@@bobanbobanic919 Try nblood or bloodgdx. They're great
@@gunzblazin6860 I'm here to donate yours...
Warhammer 40k Boltgun, Dusk, Project Warlock, Prodeus, Forgive me Father, Doom Eternal, Ultrakill, Postal Baron Damaged, Shadow Warrior 3.
The genre is VERY much alive for single players experience, and arguably more so than it has been for the past 15 years.
Arena shooters refer to multiplayer shooters like Quake 3 where everyone spawns with the same weapons. Those are called boomer shooters not arena shooters
@@Legion849 Except he includes several games that have no multiplayer component in them. Dark Forces does not have a multiplayer mode. His definition of what an arena shooter even is is so nebulous and in flux.
Many people consider Doom Eternal and Ultrakill to be arena shooters, since the games so heavily and unabashedly rely on arena combat. He could easily quantify this by including multiplayer in the title but just doesn't for some reason. Arena shooters as a genre have had some of their most successful releases in the past few years. The industry leaders just shifted towards Indie Developers, but still games like Dusk and Ultrakill are fantastic. Ultrakill is probably the best shooter ever made from a mechanical standpoint.
Liers! prodeus habe now multiplayer and its perfect and even so with dusk's dusk world altho a little bit perfect for rott 2013
@@KarazolaXTy ultra kill is the best shooter of all time
Ok but we ain't talking about single players.
I still play UT99, Quake 3 and Serious SamTFE to this day, these games will forever hold a special place in my heart.
Fuck yeah, always badass to see a fellow Serious Sam fan!
Join the Croteam gang.
Heck yea! You should hop on Xonotic and Cube 2: Sauerbraten aswell!
Arena shooters definitely fell off relevancy, but the boomer shooter genre is definitely going strong.
New Blood Interactive is proving that there's still a die-hard passion for it. ULTRAKILL is one of those games I'm convinced is gonna appeal to a large audience once it gets out of Early Access, assuming it isnt appealing to a lot of people already.
Not to mention all the other games not published by New Blood that exist that are also great. Cultic, Prodeus, Dread Templar, Ion Fury, etc.
They're making FPS games fun and Badass again. I mean, I never stopped playing this stuff, from Doom and Nukem 3D mods, to games made in GXdoom and EDuke32. Right now I'm dying to play the full release of Selaco, which feels like it has some Fear/Perfect Dark blood for a GZDoom game, with a presentation that felt like a more futuristic Ion Fury - which was also fucking awesome lol
I think people have the natural urge for things they like to be popular. I played and enjoyed ultrakill. But it's clearly dated game design and I guarantee it won't appeal to most people who have gotten in to shooters in the past 15 years or so. It's too fast and slippery and no matter how cute the robot fan art is, it just doesn't have mainstream appeal. The developers know who their audience is and it's clearly guys like you, my man. You're in the minority but that doesn't make the game any less awesome. Cheers dude!
@@BasicWorldbuilder At least to my understanding the original comments more so saying that the arena FPS (or its core formula) was/is making a comeback. DOOM 2016 would spark the peak of this return. ULTRAKILL (and Dusk and Amid Evil) hit this wave at its best. The comments not saying that ULTRAKILL is the most popular best game ever made but rather it's peak in popularity (and it's community today) show that the arena formula isn't dead and there's still an audience for it. DOOM 2016 proved people still like fast paced FPS games.
@@noodlebro6983 My response is really to the sentence I'm loosely quoting "im convinced ultrakill will appeal to a LARGE audience once it gets out of early access" and it simply won't. Counter-Strike has a large audience. Call of duty has a large audience. FORTNITE has a large audience. Tarkov, etc.
And remember. I'm on your side here, I like the boomer shooter and arena shooter genre . But marketing is my job in the real world, I'm not naive and I know the arena /boomer shooter genre as a whole, is niche.
Nothing wrong with that. I was simply disagreeing that it's going to appeal to a wide audience because I know it won't lol, Doom's biggest day ever couldnt get close to fortnite's worst day. And I don't even like fortnite .Those are just two data points but they show you the mountain that these type of shooters need to overcome if they want to ever be relevant again. If Doom can't do it. No one could, and that's okay if some developers want to keep making them. I'm sure people like us will keep buying them. There's nothing wrong with enjoying a niche product lol
I will say this right now, because Ultrakill became as popular and well received as it did. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more games inspired by Arena Shooters in the future.
truth
Ultrakill reminded me that I don’t hate FPS games, though I’ve completely burned out my ability to enjoy any multiplayer FPS.
Speaking of, I'd love to see the Act man cover Ultrakill. Though perhaps he'd wait until it's fully released...I'd love to see hit take on it.
It took longer to find someone shilling ultrakill than I thought it would
@@matts2080 I don't think anyone here is..."Shilling" it at the moment. If shilling means what I think it means, anyway
I still remember the first time I played counter-strike, I was completely blown away. Still can't believe that was over 20 years ago and I still play 1.6 to this day. What a masterpiece and blessing to the first person shooter gaming community.
This is probably one of your best videos ever. You should do more of these history lesson types.
Quake 3 Arena is simply one of the best shooters ever made. The game is pure fun. That's it. No nonsense, just pure fun.
It's painful that not many new gamers even know about how awesome it is.
"not many new gamers don't even know about how awesome it is".... what
It is awesome, but I think kids nowadays want more than just purely skill based games. I'm a teacher in real life, so I have good insight into what the kids play. Fortnite is still beyond huge, especially with younger teenagers. Of course, they play to win as well, but they also play to unlock new cosmetics, hang out with friends online or just mess around. You can't play a game like Q3 with that mindset. And honestly, some kids still get into competitive games like CS:GO. But most of them aren't. Gaming as a whole is much larger than it was when Q3 was a thing. It used to be a nerd thing. Today, it's just another hobby, just like sports.
@@chrissennfelder7249 CSGO itself is fairly dumbed down in terms of movement when compared to the old CS games. That's an attempt to appeal to casual gamers.
Played it every day just pure fun and no one cared how the others look like, they were green Tanks and splatered blood around when railed 🤣😍
@@christiansmemefactory1513 only bunny hopping got removed, thats it?
The era of arena shooters might be gone, but as the old saying says:
"Classics never die"
And we have some new pretty dope Arena Shooter: Doom 2016, Dusk, Doom Eternal, Prodeus are all pretty nice game!
@@markx787
Never better said bro!
@@markx787 un bro québécois :P
@@JOE_XD
Je suis du mexico mon ami
@@JOE_XD ouais haha de Québec même en plus.
I only recently got into mouse & keyboard FPS gaming and I downloaded Quake Champions and I gotta say, arena FPS games are something special. The fast pace, the insane movement capabilities, the emphasis on really great mechanics, it's all exactly what I want out of an FPS game. I just wish more people played them.
Ong
I personally think that console games dumbed down FPS games a lot in many ways (slowing characters down, punishing the player for even attempting to move fast/in an unintended way, reducing the arsenal of the player to only 2 weapons thus making every fight pretty much the same most of the time) but I'm not saying this because I hate consoles or because I hate console games I simply hated that every company decided to water down their games after Halo CE and CoD trying to follow the trend and trying to imitate what made these games great and now 90% of AAA FPS are like them but failing to replicate what made them so great back in the days... they're all slow and predictable now.
Modern FPS games are ultra-casual and designed around maximizing revenue.
If you've grown beyond those games there isn't much else out there to play. The only notable FPS game in the past 5 years would be Gundam Evolution and that's a hero shooter.
@@kentreed00I think it’s because it’s harder to move like that with a console controller vs a mouse and keyboard, you have much more control with pc
Its a genre that I want back in the mainstream so bad, especially the multiplayer portions. I was born far too late to see the peak of such an awesome style of game. Movement in shooters is by far my favorite aspect, so I have these games to thank for it. They're probably better off gone from the mainstream because they would have been ruined entirely by now.
We got some good callbacks like duke nukem with Ion Fury and Phantom Fury, and black mesa imo did a great job on the half life mp, and quake champions is decent.. but yeah its a genre we need back
boy would you like ultrakill
@@VEN0M415 dusk is one of my favorite singleplayer throwback shooters atm
Come to indie space, there are great boomer shooters there. Ultrakill is just better doom eternal so that's a great place to start
Have you played Turbo Overkill? Definitely deserves a spot for one of the best shooters of all time imo.
My favorite moment in Doom 2016 was in multiplayer where my buddy dodged a rocket by hip thrusting via emote
He thrusted at just the right time for it to swerve him
It was magical
I wouldn't mind seeing an emote/dance based PvP game
@@allenqueenjust dance???
@@sebastianalarcon7986 Just dance is not PvP, cmon. Not in the same way
@@allenqueen but it is?? You dance with people and fight to see who gets the best score, PvP
@@sebastianalarcon7986 Alright, I agree. I guess what I had in mind was a map, where people run around and challenge others for a dance-off and loser get eliminated. A Dance Battle Royale, maybe. Map has items which can give you score multipliers. Haha
Prodeus is a gnarly little retro arena shooter. One of the best I’ve played.
I had fun playing through the campaign, I was a bit disappointed though because it felt unfinished. I see a lot of potential in Prodeus and I hope the devs put all their blood and sweat into that game because I want to play a good arena shooter that hasn't been around for 20 years
you mean that crap with a checkpoint system? looking foward to mapcore 984029384092384098
The level design in prodeus is something else. The last few levels are mind-blowing
@@frederikvandoren when was the last time you played it? It has changed now.
@SuperHns last I played was just before Christmas, it's only like 2gb no big deal so if anything has changed I might play again.
The first game i ever played was Wolfenstein on PC while sitting on my mom’s lap in 1998. Watching her play Starwars, Wolfenstein, and Tomb Raider is the reason i’ve got such a deep love for classics like those games
Unreal Tournament 99 was such an epic game! Fast paced arena shooting with an awesome sound track. It was my life until Halo came along..
For me UT 99 it is to this day best of best... I cant helpit its just piece of perfection as fps goes.
I really got into the multiplayer of doom 2016 when it came out. I found running a loadout of super shotgun and normal pump shotgun was absolutely broken because you could shoot one, swap to other, shoot it, swap back, repeat and it would absolutely destroy people.
so like shotgun swapping in ultrakill?
@@hollow_w33n I'm sorry I don't know what is but maybe yeah?
@@hollow_w33n a souls youtuber named oroboro made a montage of it and thats how I discovered it. You can probably find it by searching oroboro doom 2016 shotgun or something and youll see exactly what I mean
@@Perrydigm97 i HIGHLY recommend giving ultrakill a try. it's technically a single-player game, but trust me.
@@hollow_w33n Ill have to look it up, Im a huge fan of single player shooters
I miss Quake and Unreal Tournament 😭
There was a re-release of quake and the multiplayer was going pretty well.. havent checked it for a while so I can only hope the population didnt drip off hard.
@@VEN0M415 Quake Champions?
@@SkyTied nope the first quake, I had the original one on steam so I got the new one for free which includes a ton of settings and visual modifiers as well as includes expansions if I remember correctly.
I just got into playing Unreal for the first time lately, and after trying out Unreal Tournament for the first time with a few friends I can definitely see why. Coming mostly from Valve titles it feels like a totally new world that I hadn't discovered, yet also very familiar and so much fun in both single player and multiplayer.
@@sulphurous2656 Valve is so goddamn good
Felt like he talked more about games that aren’t arena shooters than arena shooters themselves. This video did not need to be 30+ minutes.
I think you should mention the transition from server browser and dedicated servers to matchmaking. I think it had huge impact not only on the genre but whole industry and community around it. Modability and custom servers are a rarity right now.
One of reasons why I pretty much stopped playing multiplayer games.
@@walterscientist Same
Matchmaking is pretty bad in every single game that has used it as a main feature in my experience. I can't say for certain obviously, but I'm pretty sure actual gamers from console and PC are getting tired of the current trends. Not long till big companies catch on, hopefully. Valve might be paying attention as well. Lets be honest they get so much info from Steam based on reviews, player count, and playtime. Like of all the major companies I think they might have the best grasp of what players actually want because they have literally herded tons of PC gamers into their own ecosystem where they can straight up analyze us. It would be silly of them not to capitalize on that.
@@walterscientist same
That mention of Time splitters series is golden man!!! It's underrated and underappreited in the mid-life cycle of FPS history. Thank you Act Man you trully are a man of culture.
Time splitters is a great series. Fun gameplay, and hilarious dialogue.
Timesplitters 2 is personally my favorite game of all time. The amount of characters and the unique selections , not to mention map creator, the tough af challenges, the goofiness… man, that game is legendary. The franchise albeit
playing the OG’s (quake, duke nukem 3D, doom, jedi knight) with my dad is one of my favorite childhood memories. these games always have a spot in my heart!
I'm glad you made the comparison-ish to fighting games because its kinda true for both; there's a big skill gap in both genres. I used to play against bots in UT3 and had a blast. Once I jumped in VS live opponents, it became so clear that I had some learning to do; even someone on the other team asked if it was my first time.
i think its actually a kind of disingenuous take, considering how arena shooters have more complex mechanics compared to a special move in a fighting game, it doesnt even make sense
@@thatonecrazykobold1729 ? What lol. Arena shooters, like fighting games have one cheap, yet rewarding gimmick. They are DECEPTIVELY simple. It looks easy to zoom around in Quake 3, pull off combos in SSBU, but it's not. It is a truly laborious process to even get close to comfort, let alone mastery in either of these two genres. And if you think you've figured it out... Hop online, and bring some damn Kleenex.
I appreciate the hell out of all of your hard work! Awesome video!
this video does not deserve your money. it's factually wrong, inconsistent, and it only hurts arena shooters more.
@@user-xf8xk6hw9mFacts , Actman completely forget about the hundreds of Arena shooters we have right now ,,, “ If it ain’t AAA , It’s a dead genre “
@@shintenku *cries in aim assist*
@@PapaJoJ What do you mean aim assist !? , Talk about irrelevant stupidity , The whole point is that Act-moron didn’t do a single research about the hundreds if not thousands of Arena shooters in the market yet claim that the genre is dead , What does aim assist has to do with the video !?
@@user-xf8xk6hw9m Braindead take. Completely missing the point of the vid. Get off your computer.
Thank for the trip down memory lane, it's nice to indulge in some childhood nostalgia and happy memories early gaming brought me. Anyone who grew up in those times - you should know we lived in an era that can never be recaptured or restored, and can never be surpassed but only rivaled. We lived in the golden era of gaming - a cultural zeitgeist as gaming entered mainstream.
Amen to that!
Amen brother!
I wouldn't say that honestly. Back then i hated a lot of the games listed in the video and or didn't know them since i was born in 2000. Doom was cool but i never played the multiplayer, same for quake, i like quake but that multiplayer looks hair-pullingly frustrating to learn. Halo is cool but it isn't a hardcore arena shooter like the others even though i still see it like that. I never heard of Unreal, played Tribes Ascend on pc a couple times but no matter what all these games ended the same for me. Getting stomped by people who were better then me and never having fun because of it. And if someone says just get better at the game, i tried that for 8 years and it got me nowhere.
@@thememeilator2633 if you were born in late 80s or early 90s you’d say this otherwise. You definitely missed out on the golden era since you were too young unfortunately. The internet itself was just much different too which also affected the way we online gamed
@@donnieb390 well i dunno. My first game i ever played was Majora's mask on the N64. I grew up on nintendo games mostly and got into shooters around when i was 13 on the PS3. Games like Crisis 2. Plus you should know that my generation cares more about winning then actually having fun in these kind of games, thats why we fell out of them mostly. Our mentality was essentially "win to be better and be better to win" and a LOT of us fell out of the challenge because of it. I have my own recounting of the time from my perspective if you wanna read it.
Edit: i should clarify that nowadays i am not like that when it comes to shooters and gaming as a whole. I love almost every game i play truly and i'm far from the toxic ball of angst and emotions i use to be.
Doom Eternal is the greatest gaming experience I had in a very, very long time, it brought me back to my childhood and I'm grateful to Id for sticking to their guns and giving us one of the greatest games ever.
True
Yup it jumped right into my top 10 best games ever....attempting ANOTHER ultra nightmare run atm
100% , i think it might be my favorite game ever tbh, just due to it's incredible combat loop. It is also probably one of the only solo games i ever played that matched a multiplayer's intensity. Playing master levels on nightmare, quickswapping and comboing your way through all these demons is absolutely unmatchable. Sadly, i think the combat isn't really applicable to a multiplayer mode..
@@rooxg Tbh, I have never really care for multiplayer in games, so if the multiplayer in a game is subpar o great I really couldn't care less, good chance I'll never touch it. I understand that multi is really, really important for many or most people, but for me personally, I come from the age of goldeneye and halo split-screen deathmatches, if I'm not in the same room with my friends shitposting and bullying each other, is not worth it and I don't care about online communities, if I'm going to play with my friends, I would rather go to a friends house, play some boardgames and have the peer to peer interaction irl imho.
The soundtrack for Doom is simply the greatest video game ost I’ve ever listened to. The shear metal and power you feel out of it gets you pumped every time and my god Doomguy looks like a beast.
Fails to mention the revival in the indie scene
Those are boomer shooters not arena shooters
The nostalgia I feel for arena shooters is more second hand, as I spent my formative years watching my father play those games back in the 90s, being 6 years old watching him bust up head crabs is one of the best memory from those days. Watching him have fun with FPS games was how I got into gaming myself and so I owe a lot of my love to the legacy of old school arena shooters.
I'll always go back and play the first Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. I will always cherish their gameplay for what they are.
New Blood is making all sorts of boomer shooter styled games, the genre may not be in the limelight but it exists and will always in some capacity. ❤
I've watched the video a couple of times, and I get the feeling that you don't really understand what an arena shooter is. Half the games you mentioned and showed in the video are not arena shooters, they just had multiplayer mods that happened to be afps, the fact that Half-Life had DMC (which was a mod) doesn't mean that Half-Life is an arena shooter. No one remembers Half-Life because of the dmc mod. You also rushed Quake which is basically the most important game while talking about afps, and just briefly mention Unreal Tournament. I understand trying to contextualize how other sub-genres played a role in "killing" afps, but I just don't understand how in a 33 minutes video supposedly about afps, mentions and discussion points about actual afps can be counted on the fingers of a hand. I personally also don't believe that other shooters were the cause of death for afps, i think it's just because more people got into gaming and most of them weren't and aren't willing to "get good" at games that are purely skill based. The average player just want the quick dopamine hit that getting a victory royale in Fortnite or winning a match in CoD gives, or they want to feel good in "esports competitive" games like Valorant or Apex.
Adrenaline is a bigger factor when it comes to battle royale games
@@K4inan Not at all lol, battle royale are the literal opposite of "adrenaline". There is no adrenaline in spending 10 minutes looting and ratting just to hopefully get some fights in the last minute of a match. They are just more accessible compared to other FPS because they are thought from the ground up for the new kind of public I mentioned in my original comment. AFPS feels harder to most simply because they are JUST skill based, and if you want to "rank up" you ACTUALLY have to get good. In Apex for example, until very recently all you had to do to "get good" was literally just play a lot. That said AFPS are not hard per se, all you have to do in an AFPS is to literally just hold W, jump and shoot. They just require a little more effort to be mastered because the genre came out when games were actually made to be played and not to milk money out of the players with skins and battlepasses, so the gameplay HAD to be hooking to retain players.
@@spammus1 Yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about. 🤣🤣
@@K4inan Sounds like you are projecting hard not gonna lie! You most likely never played an Arena shooter and the biggest concept of "adrenaline" you have is looting in Tomato Town.
I honestly don’t see anything wrong with that, casual experiences are better, especially for those of us in our 30’s and 40’s who have more responsibilities and don’t have as much free time to become an expert at the game
Dude, I genuinely loved the Doom 2016 multiplayer. It was a blast once you learned the maps a bit. Once you figured out which demon and weapons you were the most effective with, it was a ton of fun. I forgot there were emotes though haha. I was for sure one of the few disappointed people when Eternal tried to do its own thing with multiplayer instead of good old deathmatch. I feel like deathmatch should always be on every Doom game. I mean, John Romero coined the phrase. Dropping deathmatch just feels wrong. Fingers crossed for the future though 🤞
A lot of games seem to be phasing out or just doing the bare minimum deathmatch modes, it's really sad. There are exceptions, but generally I like a simple deathmatch over anything else.
@@winlover37 Agreed. Deathmatch was certainly put on the back burner back when all the battle royale games started bringing in a ton of players. I don’t have the patience for a BR game. Deathmatch is nice because when you die, you just respawn and immediately go again. When you die in a BR, the time you spent playing is essentially wasted, and you have to start all over again. I’d rather just jump into a fast-paced game and have fun rather than playing something that is basically the definition of insanity.
I can at least applaud Id for trying something new. While I do think Battlemode is fun, it's definitely not Doom Eternal's main attraction.
I agree too. Even though 2016 had loadouts it was still otherwise an Arena multiplayer with it's health pickups, armor pickups, ammo pickups, power weapon spawns, and powerup spawns (which would include the demon spawn too). Act Man is on crack for saying that it sucked ass, its MP was fun as shit and just needed key changes going into Doom Eternal (though iD chickened out on doom eternal arena multiplayer)
@@fojisan2398 Battlemode is a fun little game mode but too barebones for an entire multiplayer.
Love you Act Man keep up the great content ❤
Loved this vid ActMan! Also miss and loved arena shooters back around the 2000's
I'm going to show this to my dad, I been reviving my old consoles (ps3 and gamecube) for us to relive the unreal tournament and turok days. And he asked me why did they stop making unreal tournament. You gave me a answer I can give him. Thank you.
These are your best types of the videos imo. The historical/retrospective stuff.
Hope you’ve got more in the pipeline!
Unreal tournament was super cool because it wasn’t very difficult so you could play with friends who aren’t gamers, your s/o or even your parents. It was like the Mario kart of classic arena shooters.
And Epic just Thanos snapped it out of existence - pulled all of the Unreal games from storefronts (even the single player ones) and shut down the servers so you can never play them again. I honestly despise the direction Epic took as a company once Fortnite blew up.
@@qu1253 they want to be Valve , develop engines and a distribution platform , god help us let's hope they don't try to make a console next... Edit; Valve would never delete legacy titles.
U-U-U-UTRAK-KKKK-KK-K-I-IL-ILLL-LL-L
Unreal Tournament had bots to develop to your skill lvl. I liked that a lot, good feature.
@@qu1253 Not true! You can still play UT 1999 online with the Unreal Tournament Community Patch! :D It also adds resolution settings for modern monitors. You just have to get the game itself from...somewhere...since you can't buy it anymore, if you catch my drift.
Arena shooters will always be one of my favorite genres and I’m happy that there are still some servers available even though the trend dried up.
Bless the algorithm, I have never heard of “The Act Man” but this video really hit home.
I still say it to this day, no matter how complex modern games have become in terms of their competitive aspect, none have ever trumped the spectacle of skill in arena shooters.
The skill level in competitive unreal tournament matches was so unbelievably insane that you'd think all of them were using aimbot. You had to be skilled not only in aiming and shooting, but have perfect spatial awareness and reflexes.
Watching someone pull split-second tricks to frag multiple people around the map while 90s jungle drum and bass is blasting in the background is just something id like to see again.
Doom, Quake, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament WERE MY CHILDHOOD.
They will never be forgotten
Jesse we need to play DOOM
ultrakill >>>
I love Act man for the scholastic thoroughness he puts into these videos
❤Unreal Tournament my beloved ❤
UT99 will always have a place in my heart, it's not only the best arena shooter ever conceived (imo) but it's also one of my favourite games in existence. From its maps, music, and weapons, you can tell there is much love poured into it. It's a shame that Fortnite's huge success massacred any idea of finishing UT's remake, however I do enjoy Fortnite now that zero construction is a thing, and since it brings so much joy into today's players, maybe those kids will be nostalgic about it in the future, talking about how most games in 2045 "just don't get it".
You did an amazing retrospective; good job my man.
I agree, and you didnt even mention MODS for UT99, god. Epic game. All of these modern shooters OWE their existance to UT99
My best gaming memories were with Halo. 16 person LAN parties every weekend for 2 years straight, playing 12 hours per day.
RIP LAN parties. You will be missed
I don’t mind being born in the early 00’s, but holy goddamn do LAN parties make me wish I was old enough to have been there
Dude I'm 32 and have the same group of friends from school. Now and again when we have time we still meet up at one of our houses for a LAN sesh! We all bring our TVs and consoles and stuff. Pizza and gaming. It's awesome.
they still exist...
I remember in 2016 in High School, this kid managed to get halo ce on a thumbdrive and was able to copy it to everyone elses thumbdrives. All the kids had got it copied from each other, and a shit ton of us were playing halo with each other. Full big team battles.
And the best part was how cool our school was, because they allowed us to play it even when they caught wind of it. They allowed us outside of lecture times to play it with each other. Whether in study hall, lunch, or a bit after school until the faculty left.
It was great. All the kids were trash talking each other, and it made me feel so good due to being a very decent halo player, wiping the floor with people. It was an amazing memory of high school. Because despite being a server based matchmaking with each other, we were all next to each other, making it feel like a LAN party.
I miss those days! I hope schools are still that cool with their students allowing them the joy of playing video games with each other.
They still exist
Damn man, I came into the multiplayer area when it was a little to late for the Arena Shooters, but I've got to say that there's one game that, for me, is a dream come true: Unreal Tournament 3. It really had all of it: great and smooth gameplay, game modes, vehicles, a pretty ok story and the engine to make whatever you want with it. To bad we don't see such complete packages of games now-a-days.
what about ut2004 ? its has everything copied from ut3 and more. its just the same but more of it. actually, i consider it the best arena shooter ever. excellent scaleable bots and tons of maps. looks ok and plays awesome. still on my harddrive. its on steam btw and if you want humans to play with i think its your best option.
@@syrales5539 I have seen it, but somehow, the first UT I've got into was UT3. And the gameplay and graphics blew me away then. Even now I consider it a good game in these departments
The first 3 ut are all good in their own way
[please pay 40$ to unlock access to this comment]
UT2k4 was such a monster when it came out, nowadays with the dated graphics it might be a little harder to appreciate. It was the king of shooters.
Act Man, I love your content. Been watching you for years now and what I really appreciate is that your style of editing, and timing has grown and improved without you losing a single ounce of what made your channel so charming in the first place. Always look forward to Act Man content!
The Finals is bringin it back baby!
Thinking the same thing
shit died fast, which is not suprising considering the amount of ways to cheese in the game
Just when I started going through your old content as need to scratch that itch you drop a banger
Saying a genre is dead because it does not appeal to the masses is one thing. However, there are many die hard communities keeping the AFPS alive. I can still get games nightly in various games and many Discords are dedicated to organizing game nights. So yes, dead in a sense that a developer may not take on a new AFPS, but the old school games we love are very much alive because of the gamers dedicated to keeping them alive. Xonotic and Quake are great examples.
AFPS are on life support. Discord game nights don't keep the game alive, they only serve as a way to get the remaining player together before the game is eventually fully dead. QC is the closest traditional AFPS to being alive, and it still has unreasonable que times for people outside Europe. Outside of that, Halo already showed that if the genre wants to achieve any popularity, it needs to be streamlined and simplified in every way possible, to a point where it's barely even recognisable.
Coping that the games are "alive" is just a delusional way to ignore/deny that there is zero interest in these games from players and developers, despite most AFPS being shining examples of well-designed, competitive FPS with a massive amount of skill expression and depth.
28:38 here talks how many of the arena shooters is steal with many people and very much alive but not as many fractions or importance of before, and today with games like csgo.
@@TheRadioSquare cap
Yess Xonotic is super fun as well as Cube 2: Sauerbraten. Always meet the nicest people on there.
so more like it gets revived for an evening by some people before being put down back in its coffin until next time
Grew up on UT2004 and Halo. I'm surprised Splitgate didn't take off more. Really evolved the genre in a great way.
right it's so much fun
grew up on quake live, good shit
The devs didn't know how to handle the success properly, sadly.
Mainly because it hit its limit.
Not just in its playerbase who will truly stay on for that gameplay loop, but also for its devs who had 0 idea how to handle what they had just launched and accomplished. It was spaghetti code of a couple of dorm students that caught a wave. It just didn't have any more room to grow without immense diminishing returns.
Splitgate failed because of the garbage matchmaking. They threw in bots into the matchmaking to make it feel like you were good at the game. Reality hits when you joined a match with all human players and you don't play nearly as good.
Your channel is excellent, sir. I’ve been consuming your videos and I saw my first Act Man vid 3 days ago. Keep it up
Unreal Tournament 2004 is still one of my all time favorite arena shooters. Still play it to this day!!
Really loved this history lesson Act Man 👌🏾
I learned a lot
It’s an amazing journey, hope FPSs never die 💛
The halo 3/CoD4/Gears of War era will always be the golden age of gaming for me, the industry was just about making great games
Glad someone is giving GOW their flowers
@@bigez4024 Original trilogy deserves its praise. Now we just got angsty teenaged girl trilogy and Horde 5.0 sucks ass.
@jffry890 yeah I recently finished the campaign for gears 5 that I started in 2019. IT was rough as well havent even bothered touching Horde but I believe you
Same, I had always played games before, but it's during those years that I really got hooked. Cod 4 and Gears, were the games that really drew me in. Then went on to other games, L4D, Fallout. Hell in HS I would play Quake during lunch, we had a cool teacher who would let us into the computer labs, and a bunch of my friends would hop on and have mini tournaments or just ffa. What a blast.
I never heard anything good about those game save for Halo 3. CoD4 was toxic beyond belief and the same goes for GoW. No matter how good those games actually are they will be forever ruined for me due to the fanbase's being so ungodly toxic.
Quake Champs is amazing. Still has more support than most popular fpses lol. And that’s with a solid 400 players on a great day.
Been playing and hanging with the best.
Amazing video! Had many chills watching this since I played most of these games back in the day. They don’t make them like they used to
Unreal Tournament really was amazing for its time. It had great music, awesome maps & modes, cool mutators, and fun weapons. To top it all off the bots were pretty badass and fun to play against if you had crappy dial-up and couldn't play against other people.
So happy that timesplitters was mentioned in this video. TS2 carried me through my childhood
Bro, i love your work and in my opinion, i think you should work more on the titles of your videos, i mean, i watched almost all your videos (that most interested me) before this comment, and i came here to watch the "lest interesting ones" IMO, only to find out that this is one of your best videos!
because of the Netflix 6 episode gaming documentary High Score (2020), i've already gained more insight about the history of gaming, and this video is so underrated because it summarizes how FPS was born, How multiplayer games were born, and with even more details than the documentary itself.
love your videos Act Man, the way you are unbiased and the creativity of your videos, you're basically the youtuber that most relates to me in this platform, and to think that ive found your channel this year browsing through reactions of my favorite game of all time, RDR2, "while searching for gold, ive found a diamond!"
hats off, you have my respect!
(Unrelated) PS: the whole Quantum fiasco and how you handled it, with the Ace Attorney videos and how you exposed this platform flaws, i consider it a masterpiece in your Act Saga.
(also sorry if i made some grammar mistakes along the "newspaper article" i just wrote, but in my defense, I'm from Mozambique, a country in Africa, and our main language is Portuguese)
keep up the good work and never stop being yourself!
At first I was concerned you were going to be pulling most of this essay from Errant Signal's history of FPS/Children of Doom series, but after hitting the midpoint I was pleasantly surprised to see you expand beyond that. Like a good college essay, you took your sources/inspirations and synergized them into something new that says something interesting and unique.
I grew up with Doom and Unreal Tournament 99 and I still keep them on all my computers and actively play them. I love those games, to the point that I even homebrewed my Nintendo 3DS so I could play Quake and Quake 3 when I'm out of my house. Metroid Prime Hunters also counts~
Oh man, I remember playing DooM as a kid. So much fun! Oh the early 90s gaming. Such nostalgia! Thank you ActMan for this trip down memory lane!
The best arena shooter I played by far is definetly Wolfenstine's "New" trilogy. I'm hoping the third game will live up to the hype
I'll never forget the triumph that was Unreal Tournament, specially 99 and 04. Not only surpassing most games in weapons, maps and modifiers, but also pioneering enemy AI like no other game in the genre. It's truly a testament of what easy to learn hard to master actually means.
Sadly, it was treated poorly and there's no Steam versions for the OG games. Things like that begs the question of whether or not piracy is a valid way to preserve old games.
Epic has stopped selling them on Steam but they're still available to anyone that bought them, I have every single one in my library.
@@satannstuff I hate that, too bad I could not get in hands of Unreal Tournament. B fu for Epic!
@@MS-du7ue By all acounts, if there's no legitimate way for you to play those games, feel no shame in getting those games by other mediums. Epic Games took those experience from many players, even if they legally own them.
I'm really glad I got to experience all these games in their prime. I've got so many fond memories of playing games like Duke3D, Unreal Tournament, Quake, Medal of Honor, etc. Great video dude!
I grew up on these games as a kid in the 90s. The speed and precision was so exhilarating, such a great time.
That was mostly the reasons why i disliked them back then. as a kid i jus wanted to be good at them and nothing else so i could have fun in the game but the skill ceiling was too high for me which lead to me just being angry a lot. i usually don`t like being bad at something and try hard to learn it but end up never feeling satisfied or good when i actually do learn something i wanted to learn. put that on repeat for 8 years and you have my childhood experience with Arena Shooters.
@@thememeilator2633 getting mad at the game was all part of the fun
@@anaguma90 then they weren't that good lol
@@thememeilator2633 skill issue
@@anaguma90 not wrong. I sucked at those games and no matter how hard i tried i never got better at them until i stopped caring about them all together.
Hey that was a lot of fun. Great vid man
Unreal Tournament and Tribes were some of my favorites!
Edit: Man the nostalgia in this video is unreal! Miss the days when Medal of Honor reigned supreme. Playing Rising Sun and Halo with some Starwars Battlefront, Counter Strike on the OG Xbox was life back in the day!
I LOVED splitgate, when it came out I sat through the 2 hour queue times with anticipation! I still can't believe such a small indie studio made such a great game and can't wait for the sequel
ill admit i only tried that game to kill time until halo infinite, but man i had a great time with it
It was fun. It lacked content and I soon got bored with it. I only put 3 hours into the game.
Also knowing that majority of the people I was fighting was AI didn't help. I don't feel the same unless I frag an actual person.
It's infested with bots the devs try to disguise as real players
The devs ditched the game the moment it got out of Early Access to make a sequel, how that's seen as remotely commendable is mind-blowing to me.
I tried to livestream my first impressions of splitgate and it crashed after every game..
......again and again and again.
The nostalgia of the first 20 mins of this video hit deep. Great video! 👍
I very much miss the Unreal Tournament and Duke Nukem days. Linking playstations together and networking a bunch of ancient PC's was one of the best experiences of my life. Words cant do it justice.
Keep doing what you’re doing, Acting Male. Love your content. - your fans
Some of that Quake content shown was newly added content along with new HDR lighting (or was it ray tracing?) and an overhaul to the matchmaking menus. Pretty sure we were using Gamespy back then, not really what we had back in the day.
Great video, 90% of these games are still worth playing today. I never stopped playing Counter-Strike 1.6. Long live the king!
Unreal Tournament was probably the first fps game I played and it absolutely blew me away.
It still is a ton of fun.
They should bring back that series.
That series is gone, Cliffy B and Epic decided they wanted to scuttle the entire ship so they could focus on making Gears of War, a series that didn't come close to what UT was
@@StoneTheCr0w they started on a new UT in 2014 and it was in early access til 2019 when Epic shut it all down it to focus on Fortnite
@@jinkies1649 Wrong.
@@im_lost9355 Didn't read, didn't ask. I was there in 2004 when the game released. Your comment is just as irrelevant to my topic as his was.
@@StoneTheCr0w “I’m older than you and was there at release so that means I’m right in every way” ok dick. And what he said was true,they were making a UT game in 2014,and it’s not unrealistic to think they would take people off of that project to work on Fortnite.
And if they were so big on gears,then why did they abandon it?
Nobody called them "Arena Shooters" at the height of their popularity. And I think the contemporary definition is a corruption of the original definition of "Arena Shooter" which really started with Painkiller.
They were just FPSes. Single or Multi-player.
That was it.
The Quake gameplay really takes me back. Definitely the most fun ive ever had gaming. I wish something modern could scratch that itch still but alas.
Quake Champions is prety much playable. But as was said in the video, you need to invest time to (re)learn bunnhops and game mechanics.
(Movement guide ruclips.net/video/7oOLk-1zShY/видео.html )
I do play QC from time to time since it released! But most of the time I see the same people in every game and there’s always that one dude on each team who has 50 kills while everyone else has 4-5 kills each lmao.
RIP Unreal Tournament, my favorite FPS of all time, specially UT2004.
The learning curve wasn't super steep but the mastery curve was taller than Everest, truly one of a kind type of game.
Sad Epic shelved it so hard that straight up stopped development to reallocate resources to Fortnite, and even later had the audacity to close the servers. UT was the foundation of Epic Games and they killed it.
Thank you for making this video, bringing light to this wonderful genre
I have spent countless hours in that game.
The gameplay and the soundtrack are amazing
It is beyond disgusting what they did...
@@prolamer7 so following trends is beyond disgusting
@@ShrekShrooms No, closing servers and not being able to buy the games anymore is.
IDK what Epic is even trying to do by de-listing most Unreal titles. And yes, that includes the single player components.
@@janbosch5951 didn't know that .... Ok that's disgusting
I'm a little bummed that you didn't mention Unreal Tournament 2004 by name, that was in my mind that final blast/hurrah of Arena Shooters and is still a fully playable (if delisted) game today.
I have never played shooters, but I have fond memories of watching my brother play Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein... Watching this really sends home how big the 90s were for video games. Thank you for all your hard work Mr. Man. I really enjoy your videos, even of games I will never play.
@@kosmique better in terms of effort, yes. other than that, no. if that was true then everyone and their mom would be playing quake live right now.
It's sad to see the decline of Arena Shooters. We'll always remember the good times we had playing them. Rest in peace, Arena Shooters
Cultic and DUSK would like to have a word with you.
boy you most definitely weren't around when they were popular
ULTRAKILL would like to know your location
Hmm. I always thought Counter-Strike was an Arena shooter though? And it certainly hasn't fallen? Or am I wrong on what kind of game it is? Is it just purely an FPS? Still early in the video so that might get answered later.
@@CRT_YT Is he not allowed to like Arena Shooters if he wasn't? Lmao
Act man proves once again why he is a master game commentary channel in this space...its truly dad to see something that used to be so big and popular fall off but hopefully this can lead to bigger and better things
Some of the best years of my life revolved around Arena Shooters