Other games have lots of wacky skins and stuff but the Counter Strike games never had that and hopefully never will. Some of the unofficial servers are pretty wacky which is fine as they are unofficial.
CS is not a billion dollar game. CS is a fairly unprofitable game with a giant tumor of a marketplace attached, a significant point of which is being a faux currency that escapes most currency controls
I will admit that gambling $0.16 in skins on pro matches when I was 15 was a lot of fun. Maybe I'm lucky to have gotten away (relatively) unscathed, but I do have a little nostalgia for those days.
The CS2 Skin market-cap is above $5 Billion itself. The eSport scene is massive and one of the largest in the industry. The game is almost always the most played game on Steam.
Not sure where you are getting your idea that CS isn't a billion dollar game.
Would advise looking into why those skins are so valueable. spoiler: money laundering and hooking kids on gambling
I'd argue that the only reason Steam survived when it came out was because Valve forced people to use to play Counter-Strike. They've done better in the past 15 years though, I'll give them that!
Maybe I'm old but I feel as though there's still a place for shooters of this nature. Every time I hear about new seasons dropping for some ultra-popular game I lose interest; I've no desire to keep up with the evolution of a game coordinated by a billion-dollar company to extract money from my wallet after I already paid for it.
But to be honest, I think it's an artifact of our (or at least my) generation. I've played CS for thousands of hours, same with l4d and cod2/4, and I don't _need_ a battle pass, seasons, constant updates etc. Though when chatting with my ~14 year younger cousin about this some months ago, he said it'd be "boring to play a game that doesn't get updates". So.. different times :)
Larger titles swapped over to more control in order to extract more money from the players, but also control the experience.
There is however some AAA titles every now and then which support hosting your own servers. But they're quite few these days
I'm actually looking for Android (Kindle) game recommendations that are cross platform and allow self-hosted servers.
I miss surf_greatriver and its variants :(
But yes, I was never really a 1.6 player but I felt the same way about Garry's Mod maps. Joining a random server and seeing the maps and assets download and never really knowing what you were going to spawn into... it was wonderfully weird in a way that reminds me of the individuality of the Old Internet™. It might be nostalgia talking but there's some crispness and snappiness to the Source engine that games these days don't quite have.
An entire shooter based solely upon the principles of fy_iceworld & gun game would wipe the floor with most other AAA titles on offer right now.
I've even stumbled upon fy_pool_day recreation in Roblox.
Almost anything your nostalgia can think of is available "current" games like Fortnite and Roblox.
This official version differs quite a bit from the original gun game though and it is not as fun.
I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.
I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.
There was also a whole sub-genre of skill surf, with mechanically challenging courses to complete.
Oh and then kz maps too, which was just for climbing up huge structures.
Good times
No good surf ("TDM") style games anymore, seems like that game mode has mainly died in favour of the timed surf game-mode.
So now I stick to the 'vanilla' game much more, but without a group of friends that plays regularly, it's a bit of a frustrating experience at times.
Came back to Canada and asked EB games for a copy but they didn’t know what counter strike was, and I didn’t understand that it was a mod for half life
I see a lot of people say this type of thing and it's strange to me beause it doesn't have to be serious. You can do whatever you want within reason, as long as you're not griefing or something.
I have a group of friends who I play Overwatch 2 with occasionally, but they always insist on playing quick play instead of ranked and especially in that game quick play is just worse. Rankings are just a way to match you with people of roughly equal skill, you don't have to chase a higher rank all the time. I actually like losing ranks because it just means I'll have an easier time for a while until I go back to where I start struggling.
Meanwhile I see others get legitimately emotional about dropping a rank and I just don't get it. Relax, it's just a game. We're not playing for money or fame or anything. If you're really at a level where money and fame is on the table you probably don't care about your matchmaking rank anyway.
It's just great - exactly the same game and works very smooth in a browser. I played it briefly for a few months and was happy I was able to get into the top rankings overall.
Just sharing it here if anyone wants to try it out.
I can't seem to find anything.
The indie scene blew up, modding is less popular.
Arma usually gets the more complex and janky stuff (in a fun way). While the others are more modified experiences.
Like Squad, we're they've re-created star wars battlefront
edit: actually, I got it backwards, just browse nexus mods :)
Fond memories of 1.4 and 1.5, when it was still a Half-Life mod.
Minh “Gooseman” Le, one of CS’s creators, was a fan of AQ2. Counter-Strike (first released in June 1999 as a Half-Life mod) built on AQ2’s ideas but refined them with better hitboxes, buy menus, maps, and more tactical pacing.
AQ2 is often described as “the bridge between Quake and Counter-Strike”.
The article says that Le created it though:
Two years later he created Action Quake 2, a fast-paced game inspired by “Die Hard”Leaping off the cliff on "cliff" straight through the hatch in the cable car breaking my legs but right next to my opponent and blasting him with the double barrelled shotgun as they turned round. Classic .
as_oilrig ftw
Also there were some killer WC3 mod servers out there. My goodness the fun that was had....
Seriously though, I miss the VIP and hostage rescue modes. I guess hostage rescue is still there but hardly played.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).
"Back in my day" you brought your own skins, maps, and mods to your clan's Quake 2 server and they'd be automatically copied-into other players' q2base profile directories when they connected: free and fast. Making skins in a cracked copy of Photoshop 5.5 or PaintShopPro (don't forget to save to PCX!) was trivial and because nothing really mattered no-one could possibly get angry at anything.
...but now you're telling me that if I want to add custom skins to CounterStrike I have to pay other people hugely inflated sums for the privilege of something that was still free and open to all only yesteryear? And we're surprised at how toxic the "gamer" community has become over the past 15 years since tradable lootboxes, cosmetics, and microtransactions became the norm?
However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
I have two tips:
Sell hardware and then you can get real cash. For example, use the Steam Wallet balance to buy Steam Deck Docks which you ship directly from Steam to your customer on eBay.
Secondly, use Steam Economy Enhancer.
but, you weren't playing the game as a job to make money, you were playing to have fun (hopefully?) so arguably the extra surprise money is a bonus.
for me, playing a game in order to make real world money would turn it into an awful grind and sap all the joy out of it
Is there a more valuable one?
Game with cool mechanics and a universe to play it in, that is worth $$$. Making your shirt green is not worth $... it is worth a colour-wheel implementation.
The skin is worth over $2k now, oh well.
Valve explicitly says you cannot use that version of the Source SDK to make games on Steam, yet Classic Offensive did just that and subsequently got blocked for it.
Play by the rules and you can public just about anything you want mod-wise for Source.
There is no company that comes close to allowing the sheer content and modability than Valve.
They literally give you a full SDK, near full editor tools for both Source 1 and Source 2. Ability to publish games using some of these tools and for free, host the Steam Workshop and its likely PB's of modded content.
I don't see Activision given rights and modability to CoD Games, they DMCA instantly.
I don't see EA/Dice letting people use the Frostbite engine.
And there is also the typical sports gambling shit. HLTV the main news source of the pro CS scene is full of gambling ads. Higher tier tournaments often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds between matches. And as you would expect in a scene with rampant gambling there is match fixing. The serious media and the authorities will not look into it because esports is not serious stuff, but people know it’s there. Whenever you see a tier 2 team throw a most winnable match in the weirdest fashion you can see a stream of Twitch chat messages calling it rigged. People know but nothing will be done against it. Check out Richard Lewis if you want more information on that.
https://richardlewis.substack.com/p/prologue-no-one-really-c...
I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS. But all we got is Valorant and its kernel spyware (oops I mean anticheat). Guess I should just keep player CS1.6 until I die shrug
I mean, that is still CS: you want one without gambling (which is reasonable!)
Uhm, wow. Most winnable matches often enough end when the drugs wear off for hundreds of reasons.
You are looking at it from the wrong angle. From what I have seen, it's rarely a whole team that fucks up while winning. Also: often enough: they don't seem to be aware of the pattern that just occurred in their brains (are not, as far as I learned from Paul E.). I believe these kids are put on drugs without consent.
I have no proof, of course.
I noticed it first in soccer back in '16, I think. Which surprised me because it was not boxing or wrestling or the UFC, where such things are the standard.
Skins is literally a money printing machine.
Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins. They have their own problems (usually around FOMO), but nowhere near the literal gambling that is CS.
> Valve would have shut the door on the game
In terms of not having any developers on it, sure, not impossible.
> (and quite possibly the company entirely)
Ahahahaha come on man, even without CS, Valve is one of the most profitable companies of all time.
Most games that are that old, don't survive.
Fortnite is coming onto 8 years old now. The idea of it being around for 5 years longer is not particularly alien.
[0]: https://blog.counter-strike.net/2013/08/7425/
e: Actually, I should really be focusing on the time from Arms Deal to the present, which is 12 years. So, Fortnite has even less time to catch up to CS' current lifespan with gambling.
Skins are also a money machine but it's just false to claim without it Valve would close its doors.
Did you miss the entire article? CS itself came from a dorm room. You can have excellent games that spawn from creativity instead of monetization.
I was really into the odd maps (NIPPER) and early Internet community around games (joe2). We hosted servers off of unused CPU cycles from oil exploration boxes.
This still exists all over the web, but the creators that figured out economics moved on.
CS is one of, if not, the least egregious "loot cases" systems in the gaming industry. Every case you open, gives you a reward, which can be sold. Each case you open has fixed odds and is not manipulated by the gaming companies to psychologically torment you. You get no benefit from using skins or stickers on your gun. It is purely cosmetic. Compared to other games which rely on pay2win mechanics, CSGO/CS2's systems are great.
I think skins are one of the best parts of CS. It blows my mind you can have skins worth thousands of dollars, trade them between friends like collectables, sell them for real life money and make your inventory look cool.
I agree the third party skin gambling sites aren't good, although the whole base concept, within Steam and a handful of trusted selling sites are perfectly fine.
Your gripe with the eSports side of this is also stupid. Have you watched / seen any sport on the planet? Gambling is apart of sports and sports culture, its one of the main revenue streams. Gambling helps grassroot sports and helps get kids into sports.
The whole "often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds" is rubbish. At most ESL, Blast, PGL events, the most that is even talked about odds is a brief mention of the odds, no breakdowns, no match betting options, etc. It's very, very tame. I likely have hours watching CS than I do playing too.
CS eSports is in a weird place because the funding comes from two main places in 2025, Saudi sportswashing and gambling. There used to be tons of VC, although that dried up when eSports didn't take off exactly how everyone expected it to. CS was one of the more safe investments are the game has been around for effectively two decades and has always had a competitive scene, dating back to early 2000s. CS is one of the most enjoyable and easy to watch eSports so its pretty enticing for viewers (and advertisers) although the marketablility of CS is hard due to bombs, guns and terrorists.
eSports needs a pay per view option otherwise the funding is always going to come from sketchy places, but the average eSports fan does not care enough to pay because they are too cheap to pay for stuff, or too young to have the funding to do so. Unlike traditional sport.
You are seemingly fine with killing gambling, so might as well kill all tier 2 and 3 scenes, including local scenes. They are mostly funded by gambling and even so, people throw matches because they get like 1k a month for being a tier 2 pro. People need to live and throwing gets more than their wage.
Your final point is Twitch chat messages saying stupid shit about match-fixing, I am not sure why this is even relevant. Studying twitch chat is like studying The Onion, not sure why you would.
Richard Lewis has talked extensively about everything I've said above.
People will willingly blow their paychecks, week after week, hoping to strike that 0.00275% chance for big money. This is bad for society, just like slot machines.
Meanwhile you can watch a video on youtube of a streamer pulling a $10000+ knife, several $1000+ knives, and a litany of $100+ knives and skins all in a single stream (where they sat opening cases for 8 hours straight and spending $18000 on 2000 cases + keys).
I think generally the way I've experienced people justify it is that $10000+ would be a life changing amount of money for them in a way that the $100 they have on hand isn't, and even if they strike out they still get cool skins for a game they play, so why the hell not. And eventually they are $2300 dollars poorer, with nothing to show for it but some in game skins.
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.
I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.
Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.
But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.
The X-Box was less common as the first X-Box never really sold all that well. But Halo came out for the PC as well and many people played it.
Nuketown has been featured in six different games, with 17 total variants of the map existing, and 8 different game modes that are Nuketown maps 24/7.
I think on the flip side, most of my brother's friends I played Call of Duty with probably haven't heard of counterstrike, or Quake, or unreal tournament.
If we count the Nuketown map on Call of Duty mobile (mobile has over a billion downloads) I would have to say that's the winner, but if not de_dust2 is the king. Mirage would also be pretty up there.
I find the yearly release model exhausting, honestly. Some people only play Call of Duty and still spend more per year than I do on video games.
The two subfranchises, modern warfare and black ops do generally feel substantially different though. Modern warfare is generally a slog, but black ops can be quite zoomy, especially now that Raven software is working on them.
COD can be fun, but to me it gets boring quickly.
We probably had more fun on death32c though.
I gotta imagine that sucks to play in most of them. Maybe it occasionally 'works' in another game?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=21021...
If dust had the underpass-stairs option from the beginning, and maybe moved the T spawns forward by 1 second, it probably would be just as popular today.
I also have a soft spot for Aztec because of the rain. I would join empty servers just to hang out on Aztec for the aesthetic.
Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.
I'm pretty certain that there are modern FPS's that have gotten inspiration from that legendary map.
Conference isn't really the right term here: it's more equivalent to a sports tournament (it was the BLAST Austin Major, with a $1.2 million prize pool). Also, round is confusing given the dual usage, he played for an entire showmatch.
This is closest the article gets to mentioning css and csgo. Both of those games were like 90% of my teens
Lots of history glossed over. Like the maps and plugins/addons. The mappers were legends in their own right
I used to be an admin on a group of about 18 or so connected Counter-Strike 1.6 servers called T3Houston*. We ran modified versions of various Warcraft 3 mods which added persistent XP/leveling, as well as integration with an external item store and player database the owner maintained. Most of those servers were filled to the brim during peak US gaming times, and our forum was quite active.
There aren't many games these days where you could do something like that. I discovered the community because one day I was just looking for a server with open slots for me to join. I was fairly skeptical of whatever a Warcraft mod would be like, but ended up enjoying it so I added it to my favorites. Eventually I got to know the regulars and joined the forum. Notably, the place felt far less toxic than the average server I'd join back then. I can completely believe this is just me looking at the past through rose tinted glasses, but it feels like the general toxicity has gotten worse at the same time as we've lost a lot of tools to manage it.
* If anyone else here remembers the name T3Houston: hi! I'm Stealth Penguin
If you happen to remember someone going by `nJs` - hi!
Frankly, i never liked the mod very much and only advanced a few levels. But i distinctly remember trying to kill enemies with some sort of lighting bolt move.
I believe you were playing as an orc then
It's depressing the modern COD lobbies - chucked in with skill matched randoms on a small range of gamemodes, comms kept to a minimum so no one gets offended.
Then don't get me started how 50% of playtime is spent loading / in lobbies so eye balls on store can be maximised - I'll pass.
Counter-strike was my introduction to how the Internet and TCP/IP worked. I built my first PC to play it. I learned linux to run servers for it. It inspired me and my friends to learn C to try and make our own mod. I made a website for my clan, self hosted it, and registered a domain for it.
The community was incredible, partly because of the server browser, as you point out. There was also a massive IRC community around it that was way more cohesive than what exists today. So CS was also my on ramp to IRC and the technology communities there.
I don't play a lot of games any more. Every now and then I'll try something. I have the GPU anyway and everything works great on Linux now. I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.
> I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.
Thanks for the tip!
```
alias "buyak" "buy ak47; buy vesthelm; buy primammo"
bind "F1" "buyak"
```
I guess this is more configuration than programming but as a kid it was a significant threshold still.
It also delighted me that you could bring up a console in game. So cool.
Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics.
Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure. Which of course, internally run servers tend to be built with a set image that gets cloned each time more are needed, making each one indistinguishable and fungible. The only problem becomes assigning the players accross servers depending on which ones have available capacity, which is where matchmaking comes in.
I don't think anyone is confused about why this happened. It's obvious why a game company which is trying to make money in an extremely competitive field would prefer it. Having a good reason doesn't mean that there isn't reason to mourn the loss of what came before. Some things have improved! We should celebrate that gaming is more accessible now. It's been a long time since I've been kicked from a competitive shooter mid-match because a server crashed.
> Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
I don't run a business. I'd rather have a game with small communities of players which peters out over a few years than a game with millions of players for a decade+. Toward the end of a game's life player run servers allow the game to last potentially forever. The problem of games alienating newcomers is still a problem with matchmaking systems. Your community's average skill goes up over time once the rate of new players joining slows down.
> Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Games have handled this before with "official" servers or ones run by tournament hosts. I actually had fewer trouble with hacks on heavily moderated small servers because so many people knew each other and would catch onto cheaters quickly. Services like VAC help block repeat cheaters from joining in the future. I like having access to mods and to sometimes join a server and find something completely unexpected. I don't care much about competitive play, though I do like a fair number of e-sports-y games. I never had trouble finding vanilla CS servers back in the day.
> Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
Also, I find it really ironic that you can come to this conclusion and then talk about pandering to the "competitive" crowd in the same response. Pandering to the try hards has done more damage to the fun/community aspects of gaming than hackers ever could.
SBMM on official servers for those who want to just jump into a game and are there for the game loop, alongside whatever other features the official servers might have enabled, like progression or item drops.
Alongside those, the ability to self-host servers for those who crave more of a community aspect and even things like custom modes or mods.
Since my hand eye coordination sucks, I’d hate playing without SBMM and being in games where I get stomped every time, especially when it comes to competitive shooters - playing CS or Valorant without ranks would be suffering.
On the other hand, discovering that even games like Enlisted have community servers running a zombie mod, or the endless modes of the Arma series is immensely cool. Or just the ability to have a more chill custom server if the main game’s population is toxic.
Sometimes you get wildcards like SPT-AKI where the modders give you more control over the game than the devs ever would. Either way, having any sort of control is better than giving it all up to a company that sees you as a bag of money to be squeezed.
This, this, this, this and this.
I remember people being GLUED to their favorite servers due to community reasons. In Italy we used to have hundreds, of which at least few dozen popular open community-driven servers.
Actually, server hosting CS instances was a thing, so each provider had their own to show they had the most performing, so you played for free, and to get the best thing people in the same country gathered around the same set of servers.
I to this day remember countless of player nicknames from these times, oddly, I don't remember some of my school teammates from the time.
This just isn't true. The average TF2 player had 3K hours long before any official matchmaking was introduced, and UGC (TF2) and FACEIT (CSGO) were their own renditions of community-hosted competitive servers - and were done with great success.
I think that's the thing that everyone here is ultimately mourning.
As for server uptime, if anything I think communities manage to provide excellent service and servers. Because the people running the infrastructure actually play with that infrastructure and know if something is wrong pretty quickly.
As for player retention, I played Dota in the Warcraft 3 days and it was the most played game on the planet while having horrible matchmaking on a terrible server system. And players continue playing.
And communities and particular matchup and games increase retention. I used to always play particular types of matches and rule-sets on servers I knew had a configuration and mod-set that I liked. One of the reason this doesn't exist anymore is part of the reason playing is less fun.
And again, you can have ranked match making primary servers as well if you feel like it.
> Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure.
You can still have hosted rooms on dedicated infrastructure, or have both.
I made so many friends by joining a lobby and just playing a game for a few nights in a row or whatever
Now I don't know how to really connect with people online anymore or build any kind of community
Discord servers don't seem like the right way, they are too busy and chaotic for me
I miss making friends online and gaming with them
Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.
By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.
Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.
It's not the tools it's the people
As you said, this produces a culture where there are steady pools of people both seeking out the content, and waiting to consume it. The flip side of this is that everyone also knows the game, and manages their online presence so they don't end up on the trending tab of twitter.
On our neighborhood forum, someone could say their lawn mower blade broke, and some jerkoff will start yammering and democrats and bail reform.
Pseudo Anonymity is sort of a key feature of IRC that I think acts like a strong filter for people
People who are jerks will use anonymity to be jerks whereas when they are forced to tie an account to their identity they might pretend to be not jerks
People who are kind when anonymous are likely just good people at their core
The Warcraft mod was a little goofy, but as a younger kid who couldn't appreciate the hardcore competitive scene I liked the variety and silliness it brought.
I spent way too much time finding custom skins online to keep things interesting. Good times.
Also, there were multiple tournament websites out there: ESL and another one I don't remember the name anymore, that hosted tournaments all time.
I remember lan tournaments in Italy with more than 60+ Counter Strike teams like Smau 2002, and you had to bring your own computer nonetheless.
It was really a golden age for gaming I swear.
People that didn't live that think that gaming is better now are severely mistaken.
Playing online videogames today is a solo experience, 20+ years ago it was the very opposite, even if you played alone you met people on the same hosted servers you liked, on forums, on IRC, in lan.
Today it's really sad.
1) People interacted, they truly did. Dramas, friendship, everything. Where? Quakenet, Forums. Every clan had their channel, some easily reached 1000+ people.
2) People genuinely played together in teams: CS, Day of Defeat, you name it. You had your clan and spammed #5on5 on quakenet.
3) Those clans actually met in lan! At Smau Italian Lan Party 2002 there were more than 60 Counter Strike teams from *Italy alone*. And it was a bring your own computer event[1].
I know it's part nostalgia but I legit think it is borderline impossible to have anywhere near the same level of interactions with people today. Reddit is just not a good substitute for legacy threaded forums. Discussions die fast, they don't even have the material time to develop meaningfully.
[1] https://www.aspidetr.com/images/immagini/blu/varie/smau02_03...
The smell... no comment and in one case I recall at one LAN where a delivery woman was scared to walk down the isles to deliver so she asked me nicely if I could. No problem, pizza is here boys.
But within reason, they kept to themselves and were there to game. You kind of respected that and they respected you as you were there too to do the same.
Outside of all that they were highly intellectual and I recall talking for hours about other highly intellectual topics: psychics, space mathematics, game characters. I didn't approve of their extremist views and you could tell something went wrong somewhere with their psyche but there was a mutual respect. Unfortunately I was too young (20's) to grasp the true vibe.
I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend and felt completely cold shouldered. No one was really welcoming and it was very alpha gatekeepery.
Granted the audience were clique, everyone seemed to knew each other and the mean age would be 40-something but the attitude from some left me astonished compared to attitudes of some of the worse LAN gamers.
If I can hang out with folk who are of such and yet unable to hang with those who are not, I couldn't figure what I was doing wrong. It left me sour for my first major goth event, a sub-culture I've enjoyed since 17; 36 now kind of makes me want to hand in the towel.
Maybe I was craving wanting the LAN I once I enjoyed in my teens, but it was worse than that. It felt horrible being there by myself unable to connect with others. I left a day early. Yet all there for the same reason, music.
I do believe gaming has a power to bring others together but online games now just feel half arsed and are more released for money rather than fun.
Two different sects, yet the one you'd expect to be the worse turned to be more warm. It's weird to think that, but shrug. I really don't know what to think and has left me really perplexed.
> the mean age would be 40-something
At least in Germany the "black" scene has a serious "recruitment" problem. It's basically the same set of people for decades now with very little additions to the pool.
It strange to me that I am amongst the youngest attendeds at concerts and "disco" events at 40.
I mean, if that is the general attitude
"I just got back from a goth music weekend this weekend and felt completely cold shouldered. No one was really welcoming and it was very alpha gatekeepery."
Then where should the new blood are coming from?
You're welcome to drop by, the Rock'n'Eat in particular is a good "vampires, werewolves and other demons of the night" type venue and it's quite near my house, so feel free to hit me up if you ever feel like going, it'll be a good opportunity for me to practice my German :)
Had been decades since I've been to Paris. But with a life and kid, I guess coming back isn't too high on the priority list ;-)
It just sucks on so many levels that we can’t have nice things because many among us are beasts.
If anything it got worse.
Even if the internet doesn't need training wheels, the video game where the average player is 12 might.
* sore throat
* eating
* having another conversation
* context demands silence (often requires the question to be nonverbal somehow, but not e.g. if the context is "sleeping baby right next to me")
* noisy room (often asymmetric)
* target is deaf
https://xcancel.com/AliceFromQueens/status/11280356337279303...
In the late 90s early 2000s I was very into a game called Tactics Arena Online, and we had several great communities.
I suppose I never found the right place
I think the communities still exist if you seek them out, Agora Road is a fun one.
One of the few things Google+ actually got right (admittedly after a good deal of pressure from the community) was the ability to set up simple one-way pseudonyms. It meant you could talk about business or mental health without it being forever chained to your real name.
I remember a BBS with this guy called 'Nihilist' who was a total insufferable asshole that'd make glory days Linus look like the world's most gentle man. But as is the nature with community, you learned more about him over time - and he was a guy in his 20s dying of some sort of a muscular deterioration issue, and him acting that way was just how he coped. Everybody loved him, hated him, mourned when he passed, and the community was somehow genuinely a worse place without him.
For another example I'm sure some here are familiar with, Flipcode had this one dude, extremely knowledgeable, who'd basically snipe into conversations, give amazing advice in a rather curt borderline hostile fashion (was it all caps? I think it was, but that was a long time ago), and then disappear. But he was such an important part of that already large community that I'm certain somebody else can fill in the blanks I'm leaving here.
But now when anybody does something as mild as saying the quite part out loud on dumb things, of which there are many in modern times (probably owing to this exact issue), it's like 'zomg burn the witch'! Basically a prerequisite of community requires accepting people for who they are. In modern times today that statement is basically a euphemism for sexual/LGB stuff, but obviously that's a negligibly small part of the diversity and richness of personalities, even if those personalities, or their opinions, may not always be the most pleasant or politically correct.
And that often comes from groups who loudly claim to promote, and obnoxiously demand diversity and tolerance.
Basically this has been stuck in my mind ever since 2018 when I hear a friend of my aunt's teenage daughter answer the question "should we tolerate the intolerant" with "no, we should NOT tolerate intolerant" people.
I didn't think of this back then but, by definition, if you do not tolerate intolerant people, you are yourself intolerant, and therefore do not tolerate yourself, which I imagine could lead to some problems if your life goals are anything other than "self-loathing tortured artistic genius".
Related, the classic "I can tolerate everything except the outgroup" from Scott Alexander https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
In the 2000s, I helped establish CyberCafe, a PC bang in Oakland, California, where a diverse crowd came together to play StarCraft and Counter-Strike. It was a vibrant community hub, filled with shared excitement.
I wish PC bangs would make a comeback. Despite our powerful home setups and fast internet, gaming solo in your room can’t match the electric atmosphere of playing alongside others in a match, surrounded by camaraderie and competition.
You can find many more options here https://www.co-optimus.com/games.php
Obviously, not the same as doing it in a cafe or a LAN party, but I'd personally love to play some Brood War with fellow HN folks. Private server or not, i don't really care - I just want to play with people I can connect with in the lobby or in a discord server or whatever.
I never got into SC2 but Brood War IMO is the best RTS ever made hands down.
I was really involved in how serious cs was being played in 2002 or 2003, but valve did not seize the opportunity. 5v5 is the best format.
Even today, the matchmaking is horrendous and toxic teammates ruin the fun.
When you solo queue, individual performance is ignored, so you must carry your whole team if you want to gain rank.
The game is great but generates too much frustration for me.
Relevant myg0t: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/171762 (2004, NSFW)
This Flash was my introduction to Refused though so that's cool
I can't remember my handle...I've had so many over the years.
I miss GameSpy, the original application, not the service it morphed into later. It was so easy to find a server to play on, playing the levels/mods you wanted to play.
Before that, I spent a lot of time (and money from my dad's credit card) on DWANGO. For those not familiar with DWANGO, you dialed in to their servers and then it acted like you were on a LAN. You could play games like Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, etc against other people. There was a main chat room to talk about what games you wanted to play.
It was also a much nicer place to play, partly because you had to pay _per minute_ in each game. The price wasn't anything crazy, if I recall, but it definitely kept people focused on the game.
Also met some good people and ended up working on a gaming site with one (MeccaWorld.com, on the off chance someone remembers that - I ran the Quake section) and started a company with them a decade or so later.
You drove me down nostalgia lane, looked in email and have my GameSpy receipt with unlock code. We paid $21.55 after tax in March of 1998 - my memory is really fuzzy but besides CS I think Quake III Arena was also popular at the time.
It's still very much alive.
At least the matchmaking option is so much better at making real competitive matches with players though now too. I like that both options exist.
I owe much of my career in tech to counter strike. I learned to manage servers hosting clan websites, security and programming making the sites and “borrowing” designs from Clan Templates or whatever the company was that had the awesome animated flash headers. I remember learning about IDORs and SQL injection, before I even knew what it was called.
I learned 3d modeling with MilkShape for custom skins and models. Made dozens of surf maps and a few KZ. The AMX Mod community was so helpful learning to program. I think it was Small to write mods.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. That was a pivotal moment in my life. I learned how to control a computer and found my passion.
There is seems to be lot of negativity against ranked ladders in the gaming community, but isn't that what would be best system to play with people of your own skill level.
For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.
Remember that cooperation isn't an individual skill (unless the meta is complete, I guess); it relies on knowing your specific partners.
And besides ... it's perfectly normal for a task-oriented group to have people at a variety of skill levels. If anything, homogeneity is what's strange. This does change what interesting interactions happen, but by no means prevents them.
It's a bit more nuanced than that, CS is a 5v5 game yes, but at low rank it's a lot more depedent on individual skills. I love community game servers but a lot of time those are for fooling around and not much the competitive skills.
I don't like playing a game where I need to worry about ranking systems. It adds a layer which I'm just not interested in. It's fine if I die more often than other people. Some of my fondest memories are of watching someone much more skilled than me absolutely steamroll my team. If you're playing with people you know, a vastly more skilled player becomes a fun challenge for you to try and overcome together.
It was such a gratifying experience to build out that server network and the accompanying integrations that attracted so many and built such a great community. I miss the days in college when I had time to work on stuff like that just for the love of it. I hope you are doing well!
This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.
But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.
My son spends most of his time in small closed Discord servers.
The niche areas still exist, but a lot of them are hidden and invite only, or just intentionally or unintentionally not easy to discover.
To bring this further - it's like the migration from villages to cities and towns - proliferation of alienation, loneliness, broken communities, fake smiles and treating anyone not part of your close circle as potentially hostile psycho ready to steal your kidneys, sneeze in your coffee or /dev/null ya. Anyway, no more laments for the past given the current situation presents interesting problems that nobody has solved-solved yet, perhaps because they won't make you a billionaire lol.
Nope. Maybe that's what you see because you don't have the time to check for diamonds in the coal mine but there are a ton of indie games being released every day. Many trying random concepts.
Yes modding is not en vogue nowadays but frameworks like rpg maker, godot etc allow a lot of people to experiment and materialize their ideas (good or bad). And that's without factoring in what LLM will allow when some get trained on those tools and related tutorials.
I'm just basing my views from what is available on Steam. I think there are a lot more experimental games and genres being developed and shared in those channels I don't have the time to discover and enjoy.
Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.
It's no longer the "default" way to play, and only a select amount of people get around to using it. Despite a much larger playerbase, there is far less activity than there was in the past.
There's still community servers out there (and niche communities like surf and bhop when still possible), but they're only still around for legacy reasons. If there wasn't any lineage there it would have been removed entirely in GO.
Thank you for that. This mod was awesome in LANs.
Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.
It was easy to walk around your neighborhood, and find someone with a nice garden, who was having a garden party. You could present yourself by your handle (which was probably, or at least possibly globally unique), and join in, and maybe have fun at their garden party.
It was difficult to find gardens that you didn't care about.
When you found someone in the "gaming" garden, and then found them again in the "rally driving" garden (and you know they were the same person due to the nearly globally unique handle), it was fun and exciting.
Now there are a handful of giant gardens that I don't really want to go into for the most part. They're owned by old royalty, they're uncomfortable (for me), the only reason the garden owners want me to be there is so that they can make me look at ads, not appreciate the garden. Maybe my friends are there too, but all I see are people yelling about their small section of the (private) garden.
Sure I may still find my old friends in these weird giant gardens, but ben3212 is probably not my friend Ben who happens to have the favorite number 3212.
Hacker News is a relatively "smaller" community that is closer to the old internet.
Also the top streamer on tik tok / youtube shorts / ... are not likely posting here trying to get massive up votes on their content, as there aren't very many ways to monetize having the top post on hacker news, so while this interaction happened on the "current Internet" I know of one or two places like this on the current internet. I used to know of more, and I think I liked that better.
I know this isn't so different than "Also the clouds used to be different. They used to be whiter, and puffier! It was better then!", but here I am.
(I was MethodMan)
For real, though. After years of playing CS the WC3 plugin revived the game for me. De aztec was amazing when you could teleport all around the map.
I'm doing great these days and hope you are too! That was such a fun time. If you want to get in touch, my gmail address is rimunroe. I'd love to catch up!
The ability to introduce randomization of reward around a layer of "skill issue" and plausible deniability for the matchmaker. Elo/bronze hell exists because even the worst players can just swing up and down their rank, whereas if you didn't had any other choice but play with whoever is in your local server (or LAN part, but I digress) then the only solution for you is to observe and adjust.
I'm from Greece and, we used to have lots of LAN arenas before fast internet connections became accessible. I'd get my face pushed by skilled people, and while I'd feel bad about it, the fact that I was playing with my friends and enjoyed myself made it all tolerable. Eventually I gave up feeling bad having negative k/d ratios, and could finally spectate and learn from others. The result was me becoming good enough to join my local CS clan. We never became best in the country, but I have really fond memories both from chilling as friends and highlights from matches.
And if you don't like a community, you can leave at any time.
Compared to being toxic anonymously. Unless you get banned by an algorithm, your free to just suck.
However, I was in one CS clan where a girl gave out her real number to a random guy. Within minutes she was getting spam calls and other not great stuff.
I miss my CS clan though. There was some tension and arguments, but that's inherent to any structure with people.
Funny enough one of my mates couldn't believe I wasn't white over voice chat. It was like being in this magic world where race didn't matter.
Good times.
Edit: If someone wants to start an open source realistic-ish multiplayer FPS I'm so down.
Invite only community servers. If you suck and cheat we will figure it out and ban you. None of this kernel level anti cheat junk.
If someone who actually knows how to run a business, wants to start this up I would gladly work at half of my corporate rate.
If I was a billionaire I literally would do nothing but fund to open source video game projects. And then maybe pull a Red Hat and monetize it somehow.
The question is, what to build it on. Godot?
Are we talking about actually getting this done or just dreaming of a nice billionaire giving us money ?
https://codeberg.org/Liblast/liblast-framework
I'd start with that if you want to build it in Godot.
However, I'd prefer to build it from scratch with an actual engine designed for an FPS.
ID Tech for example makes amazing FPS games that aren't resource hungry.
From 30 seconds of googling,
https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG
Seems to be a modernized version of the last Doom engine.
Hypothetically if we could actually get a team together I'd put up my own money to get art done. However, I still think creating a high quality FPS would require money at some point.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, we decided that banning toxic users was some kind of infringement on "free speech". It's wild to me that people think sites like Twitter are a better place with previously banned but now reinstated toxic users.
It's because the people doing this had a test for "toxicity" with 100% sensitivity and 0% specificity. It's easy to catch criminals if you lock up everyone ever accused.
Exactly. That's why an invite only community server can work.
Anti cheat is a losing game.
I absolutely hated server browsers. Spending ages waiting for slots to free up on decent servers. Trying a new server only to find it had 100 shitty mods installed. Servers where the admins randomly kicked or banned people, or blatantly cheated
Even just joining mid game was annoying
Give me matchmaking any day
Whenever/wherever a crowd of a certain size assembles consistently, you’ll soon have a giant corporation frothing at the mouth to monetize it
Why let these people organize communities for themselves? How on earth would we capture metrics and sell them shit?
This is why everything is awesome until corporations show up - social media is the perfect example
I don’t mean to come across as some anti corporate lunatic, it’s just the reality of the situation
We also don't need content roadmaps for these games if you give the community modding and map tools.
Nearly all my worthwhile experiences in multiplayer games were related to permanent server communities (CS clan servers, 2fort2furious, SWG emulator servers, ridiculous minecraft servers that were effectively collaborative volumetric databases for external design tools).
My youth was spent on Counterstrike: Source playing zombie mod, and then for years mapping for Zombie Escape, as a way to give back to those communities that gave me so much. I was never a mic user, and didn't use in game chat a huge amount either, but over time those regulars would still greet me and say hello. I rarely play now, but even after 17 years, when I show up once a year or so I'm always welcomed back in by all those who recognize me and admins switch to some fun maps (or some less fun ones that I made...), and we have a short catchup on life. Certainly many of these communities are on life-support, and most are long dead, but in all those people who play in these communities are the remnants of the communities who had just a little contribution in shaping the person I am today. I'll never forget when one community held a birthday event for me; for 8 hours we played every map I'd ever made, and won them all, with a full 64/64 server for the majority.
And I would never have experienced this if I hadn't happened to open Counterstrike: Source for the very first time, and my server browser's first entry just happened to be an early zombie mod server.
Shoutout to some of the old ZM/ZE communities: Syndicate Gamers, Plaguefest, i3D, icannt, ZES, Unloze & many more. ZE drove my interest to mapping, which drove my interest in Sourcemod, which drove my interest in programming, which led me to my career, which led me to my wife. Thank you.
I still remember invisible humans, elves with evasion, orcs with massive nade damage, undead with life steal… good times. I didn’t know how to spell “ultimate” so it took me forever to actually be able to bind an ult to keyboard.
People right now are having the same community experiences in custom server, or with official Valve, or third party like FaceIt... From crazy custom mods to try hard competitive games.
From time to time I stumble on some community servers when looking for a better DM warm-up server. Players and admin talking to each other like they were regulars, admin flying around in a batman skin killing a camper with lightning bolt, all the usual admin/community tools and more... also all the laughing, banter, playing songs and crap on the mic...
Would you have tried to join in? Let's just face it we've abandoned and stopped seeking it as we got older.
It's been many moons since I was into gaming, but back in the RtCW [1][2] days there was a bunch of regulars that played on a server run my (IIRC) Charter. There were many servers in the browse list, and I'm sure many had a community of regulars just like we did.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein
[2] A Linux client was actually released, which is what I mostly used. (Actually running it on FreeBSD's Linuxator.)
I'm afraid that time we long for is gone now as we've all gotten older, busier, and moved on to other things. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
While there is still some amount of it around in the Counter-Strike 2 era, there's a strong disincentive for joining random community servers when there have been client vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution.
I can't explain how excited I was for the Reforged version of the game and how disappointed I was when it flopped.
My favorite part of games is learning the mechanics and coming up with strategies. Which paired well with an endless supply of new game modes to try.
I have been unable to find any modern game that is both active and has a series of custom maps. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
Brood war is still active in Korea
As an aside. I always appreciated the street justice the admins would sometime enact. Running through the level with invincibility and godlike mods just gibbing everyone left and right.
We played together basically daily for quite some time in the early 2000s. I remember you and CamCam.
My handle here is the same as it was in CS. I spent countless hours in college in this server leveling up every class to the max and trying to break the game with the 'spider man rope'. Great times!
The rope mod was always one of my favorites. I think I asked rACEmic to add it. I have distinct memories of putting up votes in the server to see if people wanted me to enable it, especially in de_rats or de_jeepathon2k
On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.
I don’t know but it was less intimidating than trying to focus JUST on the homework. It’s always made me wonder if there are kinds of multitasking that actually work to overcome the when to work feels intimidating.
It is the most played game on Steam at basically every hour of the day, without fail and has been like that for a decade.
It is one of the most popular games on Twitch and has been for almost a decade.
It is one of the biggest eSports in the world and is the most globally diverse eSport.
It is currently at 185th place. You are probably thinking of Counter Strike 2 which is a different game full of microtransactions and gambling which is what the grandparent comment was saying Counter Strike didn't have. Gacha is the strategy in the gaming industry that makes the most money.
I thought I was decent, but, damn…this other clan destroyed us every time.
I start following the CS leagues, CAL, RiTD, STA, CPL, and look at that…there’s this clan we scrimmaged every week: CK3
So that was my intro to competitive gaming, unknowingly playing one of the best clans in the world.
This person hasn't seen competition. Take Starcraft on ICCup for example. CS/DoD where you can rely on others for team games are much easier psychologically than a one-on-one duel where it's just you and nobody else but you to fuck things up.
I got my fun from balls out running and firing rockets and rails in the chaos of free for all, and CS offered what was essentially the 'we're all campers' version, which wasn't fun at all (for me, at the time).
I didn't want to simulate anything, I want(ed) chaos, instant respawn, lightning reflexes, constant motion. Maybe I do have ADHD.
CS has stood the test of time though, so respect for that.
I did try playing CS more serious for some time but I just couldn't stand it and I never had the patience. Got to respect that.
Quake requires more skill btw.
+10
I still get a buzz watching the old Q2 / Q3 frag videos.
I was never that good, but have scored a handful of ridiculous flick rails over the time. I think Rocket Arena 3 was peak for me. I'm nearly 20 years out of practice now though. Feels like I'm getting closer to picking up some light hardcore PC gaming again though ;)
My niece is looking forward to having a crack at Portal 2 in the near future (yes, it's old, but it came up somehow or other recently, and she knows it from memes), so I'm aiming to enjoy that together. Gotta refresh myself through Portal 1 first.
You get to know the areas of the map from which you can see the most and are exposed to the least, and move along those lines as much as possible.
When I got my first personal computer, I stated playing RA3 a ton–and Unreal Tournament on the side. Later on it became Quake 3 OSP/CPMA (as well as Freeze Tag and InstaGib) and Quake Live Clan Arena, but never really competitively.
At the same time I also discovered CS 1.6. It was sort of a relaxation from all the fast-paced fragging for me. I liked the slower pace and different skill it required. I eventually joined some tournaments and started playing more competitively, hooking up with people in IRC.
I try to seek out games every now and then, but unfortunately there's less and less communities around Q3 and the likes, so it's becoming increasingly harder to find fun matches.
Competitive Quake is to CS, like bowling is to basketball btw
Among og, de_aztec was my favourite map, but somehow ended up playing de_inferno and villa piranesi the most.
But the real fun was the go bonkers world of custom and modded maps.
Today the hitbox and damage taken is all dependent on things that do not include aim i.e. if you're one game away from losing, you will likely hit jumping pistol headshots across a map and if you're 4 v 1 trying to close a round, the first person to engage will likely die and you will win with 2 or 3 left standing.
You're basically playing an RPG and paying Steam to make it look pretty. Good for Valve stock, bad for gaming
What? Who told you this?
Scoutzknivez low gravity
A youth so well spent
Though looking back, I think they killed the joy for me with version 1.6 where the guns started firing all over the place and precision became more of a random thing than anything else, unlike previous versions.
I never understood the newer versions, like Condition Zero, Source and others. They look nothing like the original CS and played differently as well.
Anyway, good times :)
Connection speed an ping was absolutely terrible back then, so I didn't really get into it.
Nowadays I code for a living, but for sure this is the game that started the spark for me.
It was a great time and I feel that I can always run this game and get back to that childhood feeling.
That's what I really loved about CS 1.6. It allowed so much freedom in terms of what kind of maps and plugins you could create. We got amazing community-cultivated game modes such as KZ, HNS, surf and so many more out of it. And what's more, it was relatively easy to whip up your own map in Hammer and get it out there for everyone to play.
Community servers were first class citizens back then, prominently displayed as soon as you launched the game. These days someone getting into the game might not ever find out about the rich variety of experiences provided by community servers because they get funneled right into the default 5v5 matchmaking experience.
I tried TF2 recently and it took me a minute to figure out how to play a game without queuing into matchmaking. It's a bit sad.
I honestly think developers undervalue the power of moddability in adding value and especially longevity for their games. Fortunately, and as you pointed out, CS 1.6 is still there, and there's still a lot of active communities around that game. I believe that's because the game allowed the community to carve out a space for the themselves and build whatever they wanted.
Those were great times, but all the strafing caused some shoulder and arm problems so I eventually gave it up and moved on.
:(
The quote from the NY Times article, "it allows amateurs to add imagination with limited resources." is exactly what I was feeling at that time. I knew nothing about programming, had minimal art skills, but was able to create CS maps.
It makes me nostalgic and wonder, "What if I started making a mod or a game today?" I really miss those golden days of modding.
You can't even play CS:GO anymore. It was all moved to CS2, with cosmetics as the highest priority.
The hostage map rotation used to be 5 maps, with variety. They've cut it to 2 maps, and are outright neglecting any variety. You can play some other maps but only in private matches.
They even got rid of the very fun drop-in mode where you could do Last man standing in pairs.
It's like they don't even care. I've completely stopped playing since CS2 and I hope they can see the metrics of other long-time gamers who also stopped.
Yeah exactly, and the golden age of modding, at least for FPS games. In a few years the engine evolves to something so advanced that only professionals can work on them. I consider HL2 the last moddable engine by the commoners. After that you gotta be a professional or someone with the patience of a saint to mod an FPS engine.
And nowadays they mostly use UE and Unity anyway. Only some of the boomer shooters are moddable.
ezekg•5mo ago
slater•5mo ago