Anyone who listens to me talk for a while knows that I'm interested in competitive gaming. This doesn't mean I'm good at games, but that I find the whole idea of competitive games fascinating.
Obviously, like everything else you've read here, my primary interest lies in competitive FPS games. But don't get me wrong, fighting and RTS games- the other two massive draws- have their own benefits and disadvantages. If you sat me down and told me to pick the genre of perfect skill, it'd be fighting games, but that's besides the point of my discussion for now.
Anyways, when it comes to competitive FPS games, one of the main problems with the whole genre is that no one can find a definitive game that incorporates all aspects of competitive play. Fans of team games have plenty of support of their titles such as Halo 3, Counter-Strike, and Call of Duty 4 while Twitch/Duel fans have the old standbys of Quake 3, Painkiller, and CPMA- though twitch games are going the way of the dodo right now.
So the question I ask every, how do we make a game that appeals to these diverse groups of people? Obviously this is impossible, so the next challenge would be to make one appeal to one group or the other. The tragic part of super competitive games are that what you see on the box are rarely what the game actually plays like.
Case in point, here's what Quake 3 should look like.
But, here's what many high level players see.
Suffice to say, it's a striking difference.
Console titles don't really suffer from this problem, as they're locked machines.
So, when making this ultimate game it's clear that a designer would need to focus on one platform or the other mainly in terms of thinking of how their ascetic will look.
Anyways, moving on to actual gameplay I'd argue for twitch midrange encounters that reward preparation. In short, the Quake model. Modern team based games rarely encourage map knowledge, while dueling based games require a certain intimacy with levels I feel is missing nowadays.
The main crux I want to get to is this, people will buy competitive games and watch them so long as they're pleasing to view. With Quake, the spaztastic nature of the game means many don't know what's going on unless they know how the game operate on an intimate level. Halo 3, on the other hand, can be picked up from casually watching. Of course, Halo has more than it's share of problems at the competitive level, but such is life.
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