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> all three failed at attracting and maintaining new players This means that they not necessarily were all that great.

• moomin 2mo ago
  Only in the rather reductive sense of “the vast majority of gamers are into other genres now”.
• acron0 2mo ago
  It can also mean the market has shifted which is more the case imo.
• madewithdrama 2mo ago
  They were great examples of what an arena shooter should be. Smooth movement, balanced weapons, well designed maps. The people who had experience with arena shooters liked them. Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however.
  • TulliusCicero 2mo ago
    > Most new players did not want to get rekt for months on end while they learned the basics, however. If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Making sure new players actually have fun is a critical part of the game's design. You can't just rely on "...and then new players will have to spend 50-60 hours getting demolished before they start having a good time." Easing that transition could mean different things -- a campaign, skirmish mode vs bots, full-on PvE co-op mode, automatching that actually works, whatever -- but you do need something effective.
    • crummy 2mo ago
      Splitgate matched new players with bots for the first few hours. It meant I had fun (then eventually I levelled up enough, matched with players, got stomped, and never picked it up again…)
      • wmil 2mo ago
        Marvel Rivals quietly matched your team up with bots if you lost twice in a row. I think that was a good system.
        • doublerabbit 2mo ago
          Overwatch too, but it got boring after a while and their matchmaking was atrocious.
          • TulliusCicero 2mo ago
            Exhaustive list of team-based PvP games where people don't complain about matchmaking:
    • MindSpunk 2mo ago
      That's largely what matchmaking aims to solve, assuming you have enough players you can get a reasonably balanced match to drop people into. Bots can teach basics, but many of these games rely on abusing game mechanics in ways the developers didn't think of in development so it's impossible to teach. Or things are physically difficult to pull off. Movement shooters especially have this problem because a core part of the game is abusing the movement system and abilities to out maneuver other players. You can explain the how, but executing it all automatically is a real skill that requires practice. I adore Titanfall 2. I sunk hundreds of hours into it. It's really something else when you get the movement down, it all happens so fast you can't think about it you just have to do it. There's no way to teach that with a tutorial, it's muscle memory and perseverance. Titanfall 2 has all of these things, campaign, skirmish with bots and PvE, but the skill floor and ceiling is still brutal. Whether it failed or not is a question of how long you expected the game to last, but it still succumbed to the same fate. The more experienced players pulled the ladder up behind them and the matchmaker didn't have enough players to give everyone a fair match.
    • _carbyau_ 2mo ago
      I've given up on PvP. What I never understood was; if I "git gud" then all that really does is shift the "I can't win" problem to someone else. It doesn't resolve it. Now if you have fun playing the game while losing to others, don't have rewards (whatever they are) based on winning against others, well that's not a problem. So now I play PvE and it is much more fun in a long term sense. There can still be stats about who the best player is, but everyone gets the rewards and has fun.
      • cubefox 2mo ago
        What about an Elo system where players get matched with players of similar skill?
      • TulliusCicero 2mo ago
        I mean good PvP systems have skill based matchmaking so almost everyone is winning and losing 50/50. Though, that's harder to do if you have a small playerbase.
        • _carbyau_ 2mo ago
          Even if you have a larger player base. A person lower down the skill ranking has to put up with the flowing of higher skill people beating them as the higher skill person travels up the ladder to their skill point. These aren't static systems.
    • bashwizard 2mo ago
      > If that's the new player experience, you done fucked up. Have you really though? I'd argue that what made arena shooters great was the steep learning curve and the grind to improve as a player. The feeling of having practiced duels for months and finally being able to beat players that used to 50-0 you every game was better than any achievement in any modern FPS game I've ever experienced. Gamers these days just doesn't really care about becoming better themselves. They want the instant gratification and that's why you have FPS games with super low TTK, perks, abilities, heroes etc. All to narrow down the skill gap between actual good players and completely new players. Maybe it's just me but I find those games boring.
      • TulliusCicero 2mo ago
        In the 90s, almost everyone was still bad at these games (because they were relatively new as a genre), so the skill discrepancies were smaller. I was there, I remember. When the skill gaps are smaller it's not as big of a deal to play "stronger" players. But when the skill gaps are huge, it becomes a real problem.
        • bashwizard 2mo ago
          Skill gaps back then were HUGE. At least in the games I used to play and compete in. Mainly Quake, CS and StarCraft. If you were an average/decent player, you'd get absolutely destroyed by a good player every single time and it was never even close. Modern FPS games with SBMM creates this huge "blob" of low-to-average players that will rarely if ever even have the chance of playing against an actual good player and they have no clue of how huge the difference in skill gap it is.
• ColdStream 2mo ago
  Popularity and quality are two very different things. There are many brilliant games that simply didn't get much attention simply because of luck or attention got dragged somewhere else.