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I remember back in the early days of Planet Quake, when Bastard (Basty) was running the site. This was of course before Gamespy transformed from being a little ping tool, into a giant marketing juggernaught. Quake lovers like myself would collect in #planetquake and chat about the latest mod, hang out on servers and submit news to contribute to the (then) growing online Quake community.

I did a lot of mods myself. Some I would have liked to have finished, but the ones I did finish all collect dust now. (and some of them collected dust THEN)

At the same time Bluesnews was also a great place to find out awesome insights to the whole Quake scene.

Look at these two sites now, and all you can see is marketing.

They both, arguably, sold out. I don't know why... maybe they like affording new computers from Alienware, or maybe they just like the concept of selling their souls. Another person who sold out bigtime was Dakota, the CTF guy that some of you might remember as the founder of Captured.com (which is now closed). He joined Gamespy and is running a large part of that company now. He used to post amazing CTF news, mods, tourney info and stuff.

Vid journalists all get bought up by the industry.

But the games changed, too. It used to be a lot of fun to play Quake or Thunderwalker on servers, but then other games came along and stole the show, thus putting an end to the tight-knit community. Each new game fractured the core community until, for quite a while, there was no cohesion.

All good things come to an end, and I think that is how we really know they were good.

take that, northwest seccessionist forces!

Making a bunch of troops that sap your enemies resources indirectly through killing their troops can only go so far and for me, only be so fun. A lot of responses to this story are going to refer to larger online games, perhaps with an interesting motif such as World War 2.

I don't really care about presentations when coming up with gameplay ideas. The theme can come later. Too many people in the game industry think they're in the movie industry as it is. :)

That said, I think an interesting strategy game would be one where you build a fortress in a 3D world out of blocks much like lego in a round turn much like the classic game of Rampart. Once the turn is up, each side is presented with a number of units (which grows every turn) to infiltrate and attempt to demolish the newly created base.

The game ends when all of the resource generating 'units' have been destroyed. The number of resource generating units depends entirely on the level chosen for play.

What is cool about this game:

• The harvesting of resources is automatically done until you fuck up. This is the opposite of a lot of RTS games, and removes an initial learning curve.
• The game varies wildly with each opponent that you play, as their architecture, traps and strategies therein allow for a far larger variant than a normal FPS 'tank rush' game.
• The gameplay allows you to set up "fun moments". This is a key aspect to multiplayer gaming these days. With games like CaptureStrike, the style of game allows you to set up conditions.

  For example, the basic premise of CaptureStrike is that one CTF team is entirely on offense and one is entirely defense. Both teams are loaded up with all their weapons and told to attack. Now you are a) Attacking with full health and armour and b) With teammates assistance. This gives the player an opportunity to do something incredibly worthwhile for his team, and keeps him riveted to the game. And, it's guaranteed to happen approx. once a minute. (CaptureStrike is really fun, by the way. You can grab the ThreeWave Q3CTF mod at this URL if you're interested in trying it out.)

Bad things about this game style:

• Infiltrating the enemy's base would probably be best done in an FPS style manner, but that only allows you to control one person at a time by conventional logic. If there are many people on a team, who is going to build the architecture?
• It would be possible, but tough to prevent architectural traps which lead to impossibilities. For example, you could make your base have a drop down ledge which you cannot get back up. When leaving your base to attack the enemy, you leap down, but cannot get back up. Now your fortress is impenetrable, but you cannot go home. Solutions to this are some algorithm intensive work, or perhaps a game style much like Capture The Flag, where you HAVE to go back to your base.

It's about time a new multiplayer gameplay strategy game style came to be. And these days, a game where you only need two players to be fun can be considered low risk- A lot of games aren't popular because they aren't popular. You need a bare minimum of four players to make a team game fun.

For shame. www.captured.com. I barely even have time to play games anymore, but at least I can virtually enjoy them through kerbuffel & crew.

I beg to differ. Computer games need the multi-player game just as much as the single-player game. You mention Half-Life, which I'll do now. It's got an amazing single-player game and had a decent multi-player. Sure, it wasn't great but, deathmatches aren't good at all (in my opinoin). But, it must have had something good in it because now it is the most highly played game in the world. There are more Counter-Strike players alone than combining all UT & Q3A players. And that's just Counter-Strike. There is also TFC to account for, adding another 1,000 servers easily to the list.

Now, compare the above statement about Half-Life's multi-player to Q3A's or UT's. They're both DM's. Sure, there's CTF and Domination and Assault in UT but, it's still almost all DM. Q3A is starting to come out with some good MODs like q3f and WFA. Now, compare Half-Life's already established MODs. Counter-Strike, TFC, and the rising Firearms. This should be enough proof that Half-Life's multi-player is by far, superior.

Id software can make a good multi-player game as can be seen in Q3A. They can also make a good single-player game as can be seen in almost all of Id's other games. Hopefully, Id software will put the two together to make one outstanding game.

Have a nice day,

In case you haven't played it, there is a totally incredible class based mod, Weapons Factory for quake 3. The classes are more refined, you have stuff like laser guns and alarm systems, mines, and each class has a different model. The levels in this mod are pretty spectacular. There are actual dark places to hide (its not camping, its war) and other than that the levels just have a great look and feel. Now one model I would like to see ported to linux quake2 or a whole new quake3 version is the class based aliens vs humans mod that I just can't quite think of the name at the moment. Oh well...


_joshua_

Dunno why are you bitching and hiding.. but I'd like to point out that Zoid wrote the current Q3CTF, and many don't even know what mods are.. those are the ones who are stuck with the DM with Flags like I like to say - Zoid didn't make a right move imho on this one.

But he did a fine job porting q1/q2 to linux.. I'd be running these under linux since a long time ago if I had decent OpenGL drivers (nVidia..)

Classic CTF is one answer to retrieve the true lost spirit of Q1CTF and in some respects Q2CTF - found here.

".. and you know what happens when you make an assumption. You make an ass out of you .. and umption."

Threewave CTF's home page isn't http://threewave.com/. It's http://www.captured.com/threewave/ and it hasn't been updated since he went to work for id (if I'm not mistaken).

As always, this comes with the disclaimer that I may be wrong.

This _possibly_ all very well and good but will people please pay attention to the fact that the US is _not_ the be all and end all of computer users. broadband is _very_ scarce in the likes of the UK and _horribly_ expensive. Heck ISDN costs me (eq) $80 a month PLUS charges, PLUS call charges, PLUS your isp. So, having to pay for remote apps and paying PER MINUTE while downloading them as well. Gee how much fun... *stares into bottomless pit* a license _fee_ to run MS apps per year _might_ be a more viable option, much in the same way you get car insurance and roadtax, dog or tv licences. Heck a _computer_ license might not be such a bad thing, would sure as hell cut down on the number of assholes and lusers online. Now Mr Bloggs, Id like you to type in a sample email and send it to me. Good, good, Oh dear. Im afraid you used caps-lock excessively, Im afraid Im going to have to fail you. No computer use for you. Ho hum. Darkseid-[D!] clan [VVV] - we came, we saw, we kicked ass The Boomstick Joint (my ubb codes suck, www.captured.com/boomstick)