doesn't have battle pass with peter griffin

same issue as tekken everyone whos played since they were kids have so much legacy knowledge and skill it gatekeeps a huge amount of people that wanna try out but cant keep up and get discouraged by boomers

People arent just playing games because the gameplay is good

And I feel like some of them get turned onto things like Quake ans TF2 from things like Overwatch and Fortnite. I've ran into like 3 people who were turned onto Quake from Fortnite

massively this. a big section of gamers only play games because other people play games and its just what people our age do not because they actually enjoy them. thats why they hop from current game to current game. anyone here know someone still playing the finals? palworld? battlebit?

alien concept to most of us on this forum because we play 1 game from 2007 for multiple thousands of hours and over the span of a decade+ (because we actually enjoy it to the point of addiction)

arena shooters are incredibly asocial as a genre

if you want to introduce your non-arena shooter playing mates to arena shooters, they kind of have to accept that they're going to get curbstomped by either you or by other random people in servers and who wants to spend their free time chain-dying on deck 16 for hours every day for months until they get good if y'all can go play a team game where you can at least cooperate

this pretty much nails it on the head, as a zoomer who wants to play afps games, getting curbstomped by some guy with parkinsons because he knows exactly where and when items will spawn and i dont is very frustrating

mge is good for this cause there's always a fresh supply of 1600s

I can kinda agree, but keeping track of item spawn times honestly is just one of the more important skills for quake :-/ it's part of what makes it competitive / interesting. Otherwise, it would just be MGE with better movements, weapons, and maps lol. feels sort of like saying 6s is gatekept because you haven't played long enough to know how to track ubers or rocket jump.

the youth sucks at games now

im not saying that i want to change quake, im saying that (unlike 6s for example) there are very few "beginner" players, so you'd be hard pressed to find a game where you're not getting knowledge gapped by a 40 year old with 16000 hours in the game, thus making it frustrating.

not enough shiny shit, harder barrier of entry to get good

Besides the reasons others have listed, imo indie quake-likes don't really do enough to differentiate themselves from quake itself. Sure, there are differences but they're the sort of things that are only going to mean anything to you if you're already an experienced quake player. I would bet money that a standalone successor to 6v6 TF2 has more of a chance of making it than something like diabotical.

In the AAA space arena shooters are very unappealing. Epic was working on a new unreal tournament and I wouldn't be surprised if they stopped development upon realizing that they could either work on this or work on a game that plays well on both PC and consoles. You could use cs or valorant as a counterexample here as they're both popular and unplayable on controller but there difference there is that that style of game has sustained it's population over the years at a level that ensures there are plenty of other people to play with that are also new. I also think those games have more transferable skills from a game like apex. Overwatch is the closest thing I can think of to a popular modern arena shooter and I do not think it would be anywhere near as popular for both gameplay and accessibility reasons if it was not controller friendly.

My generation is cooked, I tried showing my friends tf2 saying about how much fun it is casually and even competitively, the bots ruined it for them. They didn't like the fact that this game is considered "old" and that their isn't in game competitive. Made fun of the fact I liked playing the game. Despite the amount of factors that are in your control unlike most games nowadays.

Quake doesn't appeal to a casual or competitive audience anymore.

Casual gamers will play games that are popular and that are easy to get into (content creation for video games is a HUGE factor). But since quake is neither easy with its high skill floor and ceiling or is massively popular so that you can have more balanced matchmaking, you end up with new players being curb stomped and quitting.

If you are a competitive player the question you need to answer is: "Why would I invest my time into quake, when I could invest my time into any other competitive FPS game and get x100". Like why would any 15-16 yr old spend time grinding quake - when they could grind CS, Valorant or Apex Legends?

They would get more opportunities, more LANs and more money. For less effort, as you could collect a paycheck in T3-T2 CS or you could try win a LAN against rapha for the same paycheck. Plus, a player can shift to streaming/coaching/casting/analyst/content creator if it doesn’t work out.

Now there are a few new players and an older audience who will be able to deal with these problems because they end up finding the game very enjoyable. But the franchise is dead in the water at the moment. Honestly, I don't know how they would fix these problems.

quake needs more objective game types just yoink most of them from halo i wanna play strongholds w/ rockets and LG

yeah why doesnt quake have oddball

someone should make quake but with teams and you can choose between different types of characters that all have different attributes and abilities

I feel like 1v1 games and game modes never really take off competitively, so they get very little recognition. Starcraft, quake, MK, Tekken all have pretty high skill ceilings but clearly that is not what matters. IMHO they are all pretty boring to spectate which is a pretty important factor.

fear

The vast majority of those quake players with 20 years of exp are not good. Its not the skill difference that is the reason why they don't have players its just people don't care.

A lot of TF2 players who were young start playing quake because Yz50/Mike/Clockwork play those games, so we have a reason to care about it, but people from games like Fortnite don't have that, unless they heard about it from playing Kovaks or something, which is the reason why I ran into those Zoomer Fortnite players in the first place.

And in regards to the newer Quake games, they never got big because the old quake pros would rather be playing the old shite and they have no casual people and so no audience for anyone - just desperate attempt of forcing an esport

popular games with enough players and matchmaking (and maybe handicap systems and team based gamemodes) should mitigate this

imo

gamemodes are bad, this was a huge issue for diabotical and you could see it in the gamemodes new people played/liked. Most of the positive feedback came from the 1v1/2v2 gamemode and wipeout, or at least that's what you would see when you opened any random players stream. Serious 1v1 gamemodes are not fun in afps, they work in fighting games because you will sometimes be sitting next to your friend playing with them, not true in quake. All of the traditional team games modes require timing, which is not very fun to learn especially 25/35s timers can be a pain, and the 30/30 that exists in qc is often times fairly painful in certain cases because it means you can run the items infinitely without a player ever having to delay an item.

When I started playing qc I was OK at timing items just by vibes from cpma, which is a thing players will learn, but it's not a fun journey to learn, imagine playing 6s but you always have uber disad and you don't know how to stop that from happening. Luckily, timing in sac is largely irrelevant, and the game mode itself is so foreign to the ones commonly played previously tdm/ctf/ca that it was a pretty decent gateway drug. A surprising amount of na players in qc (not that it's a large community) can trace their origin back to sac.

Wipe-out in diabotical was a good experience and I think it hooked a lot of new players for awhile until they realized how much of a mountain there is to climb to even play the game in the other two game modes they had in rotation. There was some other weird stuff going on with menus and matchmaking that diabotical had some issues with too. However, it felt to me diabotical was this game for practicing aim for most people because there just wasn't this long term goal to invest into or this addicting thing to play, for most people simply practicing aim will get boring at some point.

basically what nintails says here, but I would extend the logic to casual players as well

there's also not enough focus on casual experience, for most first time players loading into a server with 8 players or less is going to be a test unless you get lucky and everyone else is new to the game. TF2 solves this issue by having the default pub game mode having 24. Even in ql as it is now, the pubs that are played are a 24 Player FFA server and a 10 v 10 CA server. There are a couple of other thing going on every night but those are usually organized and played by players with a higher ELO (CA on those servers for instance has an ELO gate because having a low level player in them would be awful for everyone). edit: also being defenseless on spawn is one of the dumbest things quake players hold onto for some unknown reason, one of the best things qc ever did was give you the option to spawn with a shotgun or nailgun, and all of the starting weapons are a threat along with your stack.

Sidebar: QC has a terrible ass engine, and playing above 60 ping in QL is awful because the engine is also kinda crap (I don't think it's possible to run the game over 250 fps, and the game starts getting real buggy with physics and sound when you do play it at 250). From what I can tell DBT is fairly dead, despite it having a pretty solid netcode, but it might just be because I haven't interacted with it. The game itself just seemed to being trying to be Q3 but again which I don't really think is as appealing to large player bases as Q3 players think

it's largely just game modes bad, DBT seemed to really treat the design of gamemodes as something disparate from the basic core of gameplay that it needed to nail rock solid and like really fell flat cause of it, and I think DBT had decent momentum at one point to hold a steady player base if it had really been the experience people wanted. QC you can straight up just blame on the engine being awful imo, playing that game a lot of the time feels like you are playing a sim that is playing a game. There hasn't really been anything else that has scratched those two in terms of potential for a player base.

also the community just spews slurs

Too high of a skill floor. The reason why tactical shooters like valorant are what's popular now is because those games at a fundamental level are pretty simple to understand and grasp, a beginner could jump into their first game and be able to get some kills, maybe even go positive on k/d and win. You can't really do that in something like ql, you already have to have a good grasp on movement and know the map you're playing very well and be able to understand how item/map control works & be able to control the major items. I felt like it was pretty hard to convince my friends to try out stuff like diabotical or quake when they had to spend like an hour learning all the stuff about the game just to get rolled anyway.

I don’t think I missed it above, sorry if it’s already been brought up.

A big factor for the niche afps or older ones is the sheer difficulty involved with the installation, setup, and optimization process. Cpma alone has that as a barrier just to play games and pickups, I can only imagine the same with others like AG. Other games like QL or reflex can feel awful until you find some perfect (or best) balance you can implement. Even then, it feels like some optimization is incredibly hard to come across. It’s not at the level of being gatekept, but you certainly need to know folks in the community who have extensive knowledge (thanks *xe for your cpma archives lol).

These games aren’t one-click install, plug & play, and most of the older ones aren’t click to search either which makes the overall process such a chore for any player, new or old. I can’t imagine trying to explain IRC or pre-discord rituals people did to find games to the modern gamer. Also good luck trying to get into some of the older scenes, you will either be accused of being an alt, or face uphill battles until you make it enough to hold your own. Best advice to anyone who’s been trying is to find said game’s discord or active platform, as the remaining players there are usually engaging enough to work with new players (reflex for instance hosting newbie cups). Lastly, some comments about youth sucking, I fear those kovaak prodigies lol, seen so many of those young players who grinded out aims scenarios and hit 40-50 lg acc steadily.

I think it would also help if these games had first-class support for "practice" game modes. Like the game hosting defrag servers and including a clone of kovaaks. It would be even better if there was a matchmaking system and you could play these practice modes while waiting :-/ would help with low player counts.
It's easier to meet people while messing around on jump servers vs dueling and it would give people more stuff to do while waiting for things to start and/or friends to sign on, which has always been a pretty painful part of afps for me :-(.

I think Painkiller is very interesting here: you spawn with rail that 2 shots a fullstack and a melee that can shoot a slow, telegraphed projectile that instakills
Even going 20-0 in duels is still fun because you're actually useful off spawn, and it's difficult to control the entire map with 20s items so you're always going to get some scraps at least

If you step back a moment and really think about where popular multi-player games come from, the answer is almost always that they start out as some janky mod; not from the original intent of the game's developers. This is especially true for entire genres: CS(Action Quake), TF2(Quakeworld Team Fortress), DotA(DotA mod for Warcraft III and to some extent the Aeon of Strife custom map in StarCraft), PubG(DayZ), even the activity of speedrunning can be seen as a mod.

It seems like a really bad idea to try to forcefully create "the next big thing", instead of just using your eyeballs and looking around to see what people are enjoying, and then developing that into a fully fledged game or game mode. It's the same mindset large companies have when it comes to quality control: we'll make it perfect so we don't have to deal with any issues later. Guess what... you can test it all you like, but once you give your product to a million monkeys, they will find their own unique and unpredictable ways to use and break it. At some point, you need to stop kidding yourself by trying to pre-empt everything and just chuck your product out there and observe what your customers do with it.

If Quake Champions weren't running on a Frankenstein engine and they had put some effort into making a proper defrag mode with interactive tutorials, maps and achievements, I think it would already have drawn in many more players. The game has half a dozen movement styles for heaven's sake, why not play into that more and get players through the door that way?

Edit: This is also why it's absolutely brainless that all these companies want to lock down their games these days, not offering self-hosted servers or modding avenues.