What happened to online team-based fps gaming? Splash Damage ruined it for me.

This article was inspired by many fellow online friends that keep asking me what is the 'next big game'. And now I finally have an answer to give them:

The Past: [/u]
I have found Return to Castle Wolfenstein to be one of the most successful team based objective games of all time. The game play and spectator entrainment was phenomenal. Add-ons like WolfTV along with OSP and a shout caster by the name of Warwitch from the Team Sportscast Network made the game play experience fantastic. These were the days where you could actually watch a full match and be entertained. Watching The Doctors vs. Infensus duel it out on mp_ice on WolfTV was flat out awesome. RTCW was the pioneer team based objective shooter that was smooth as butter. Nerve, the company in charge of the multiplayer for RTCW, did such a fantastic job and should be praised for their work. Now looking back at things, was it Nerve who came up with the idea to make a 'med and ammo' pack along with different classes in a team based objective? If it was they are pure geniuses.

After 2003 gaming for me was never the same. Many players left RTCW to fulfill their gaming careers in something else that was more competitive. Call of Duty and Counter Strike/Source were (and still are) the most competitive first-person shooters that have much more money that was backed into them. I don't really like the type of one life to live games for competition and never could find myself playing them competitively. I feel they are slow and getting killed at the beginning of the round and waiting a couple of minutes for the next round is not my cup of tea. So what was offered next you ask?

Splash Damage released their unfinished project and released Enemy Territory (W:ET). W:ET never offered the same thrill and intensiveness that was in rtcw. It was a great pub game where you could join a server and see how many unskilled players you could spawn camp in 30 minutes. As for the competition it was bogus. The competition mod (etpro) was developed and set into the community almost a year after its release. This mod did not give me the same euphoric desire that rtcw once did.

W:ET spectator mode was not as entertaining due to the larger maps and multiple objectives compared to RTCW. For example: on a typical RTCW map of mp_beach the round length was 8:00 minutes and ithe objective could be obtained 2:00 minutes. This made it perfect for viewing on WolfTV. Objectives such as blowing up the side wall on mp_beach were a necessity but did not need to be destroyed in order for you to win the round. Teams could get lucky and boost a player over a wall and catch the defense off guard in order to complete set or break a time.

W:ET on the other hand you had to build a bridge, escort a tank half way around the map, blow up a door and plant at the last objective. Complete all this is a time-consuming and spectator boring 15 minutes. If you defense made a mistake on the first stage you had time to re-organize on the second or third stage and probably were able to salvage the round. In RTCW if you messed up once on defense it was very hard to recover and set back up. Not to mention the spam W:ET had when it was first turned into competition. It only took 1 year for the leagues to implement an anti spam setting which was created by a third party gamer (not Splash Damage).

The Present: [/u]
Let's fast forward to 2007. Splash damage was in charge of Enemy Territory Quakewars (ETQW). Based on original W:ET the game play and spectator entrainment flat out sucks. Like W:ET, you have to build a bridge, escort a vehicle (while repairing with a wrench) destroy 2 AVT's 1 APT's, dodge two plasma motors and hack and objective. Once this was completed Splash Damage thought it was enough pain and frustration that they included a final objective of blowing up a generator to set a time. Complete all this in an agonizing and painful 20 minutes! First of all, who wants to spectator Bob the builder repairing an MCP? Second, how could Splash Damage fuck up something Nerve created not once, but twice with ET:QW. When ET:QW competition was at his peak (2007), the game could hardly field over 50 teams to compete for thousands of dollars and prizes for an online league (TGL Intel Extreme). Like W:ET; 16 teams could not be fielded at quakecon (unlike RTCW which had to have online qualifiers the two years it was at quakecon) and had to settle by making pub teams at the event. You cannot pay people to play this game!

Splash Damage even tried to be creative by offering the game for free with select EVGA cards. Did this work? Absolutely Not. Once again a frustrated player of the game had to clean up Splash Damage's mess and create a mod called etqwpro to limit the over abused spam for competition. This time the mod was implement about 6 months after the games initial release but it was too late.

The Future: [/u]
RTCW2 code name "Wolfenstein" is on the horizon and due out in 2009. I can tell you that this game will be much better then W:ET and ET:QW mainly because splash damage is NOT[/u] developing Wolfenstein. From now on if anyone asks me what is the next big team-based fps I will tell them anything that splash damage does not touch!

Conclusion: [/u]
What frustrates me is that many people that played W:ET never had the chance to see, live, and enjoy what I saw with RTCW. Those that have participated during this time remember the euphoria that rtcw gave you. Your typically W:ET player downloaded the game for free and got addicted to the team based and class orientation. This game style was started by Nerve and implemented back in 2000 with rtcw.

The main reason W:ET was successful because it was FREE and available to a large range of players. However, if RTCW was offered for free like W:ET was back in 2003 it would have be even bigger, better and had a lot more competition then W:ET. I will also go out on a limb as say there would have been much more money and prizes involved which would have lead to many more LAN event, competition, and players that would actually enjoy the game play and continue to play the game.

Since Nerve is not working on the multiplayer for Wolfenstein I have a couple of recommendation for Endrant Studios. Don't be crazy with the multiplayer and try and re-invent the wheel. Keep it simple and basically copy what Nerve did with RTCW. Use the same weapons, movement, spread and shooting theory's as Nerve. It might be too late but even using the quake3 engine would be great and include updated graphics. Use all those fancy terminology words that are on the new Nvidia graphics cards that we the gamer have no clue what they do. Port over the same maps as RTCW and include a competition mod with its release and not have some third party coder that doesn't get paid a dime of profits to do it for you. If you basically re-release RTCW with better graphics it will be worth the $59.95 and you have the game of the year.

This is a recent picture of a screen shot of Wolfenstein and so far I’m not impressed.
wolfenstein