Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Back to Arena Shooters

For me currently history is repeating itself from exactly ten years ago. We got the latest topdown Zelda the year before and the next big Zelda game is in the making, but there probably won't be any news about this game until June (or even later this year) and there aren't (m)any interesting Nintendo topics to talk about, at least not for me personally.

Instead I have invested time and money in some new PC hardware and got back into my favorite genre that doesn't have anything to do with Nintendo: Arena Shooters. Ten years ago this has been Unreal Tournament 3 (as evident here and here) and now it is mainly Quake Champions, but I've also tried the "new" Unreal Tournament, as well as some others.

promotional image of Quake Champions with the Ranger fighting Visor

Overall this is a genre that has been nearly dead for a decade now, where the shift has been clearly towards more tactical and console-friendly experiences like Call of Duty and of course the latest Battle Royale trend. The new Unreal Tournament was even abandoned in a pre-alpha state in favor of the very popular Fortnite by Epic Games, while Quake Champions is seemingly only developed by a single guy now (still better than no one). These type of games are just not popular any longer...

For me, however, Arena Shooters are still the way to go. And I don't even play first person shooters all too competitively, instead I play them for the fun of it, where fast is fun and unrealistic is fun. And I often find them relaxing, which may seem weird considering that these games are all about fast-paced, adrenaline-induced action. But Arena Shooters have this certain flow to them, where getting killed doesn't take you out of the game, where I rarely get stressed (unless you're doing flag runs, but that's part of the reason why I'm not a fan of Capture the Flag modes). And the high variety in different gametypes and maps always made sure that these game don't get boring too quickly.

In general I'm planning to talk a little bit more about this genre and some of its games from the last years in a special feature on this blog. Just so that you know.

I've also been playing the original Unreal Tournament quite a lot ever since its 20th Anniversary in November. Here I have been working hard on a quite extensive map pack, which I hopefully will be able to release in the next weeks. But more on that later.

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