Classic games with no modern successors

Tek7

CGA President, Tribe of Judah Founder & President
Staff member
Last Thursday (August 18), Bethesda released update 4 for the 2021 remaster of Quake 1. The update included Threewave CTF, a classic mod that originally brought CTF to Quake in 1996.

I played several rounds of Quake CTF with Gordan_FreeMUTTman, Longhorn, and CerealPiller and had a BLAST.

During and after the CTF matches, we talked about classic games that don't have modern equivalents or successors, including Unreal Tournament 2004's Onslaught mode, Natural Selection 2 (2012), and Heretic II (1998).

What other games would you all add to the list of unique classics?
 
I never played most of the golden age multiplayer FPS stuff having only really played UT 2004, UT3, NS2, and TF2 so I can't really add much. I tend to like my FPSs to be paced with a bit of downtime between spurts of frantic action not go, go, go, all the time. I do totally miss the old style 24-32 player, dedicated server, style of games though. I really hope that makes a comeback but I've only really seen indie games with that. I can only hope companies will stop trying to personally control every server and stop pushing battle royal or 6v6. Battle royal is ok-ish but 6v6 I find blech. With respect to those who have little time to spend and want to get into a game quickly I think the immediate gratification mindset has gone too far in games. On that note I really liked NS2 but it had the opposite problem of trying to get teams balanced. Last time I tried it most of my play time was spent trying to get teams scrambled decently. That said I hope an NS3 gets made someday.

Battlefield 2142 isn't exactly classic era, or Unreal Onslaught, but I always thought it was underrated and the game mode that made it, Titan, was unique. Fun times with Blackbeard in a tank :) . Then EA shut down the servers because that is what you get when you can't make your own servers (at least easily).
 
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On the subject of dedicated servers, I found this list of games that support player-hosted servers on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41339173-Self-Hosted-Games/

Unfortunately (for me), most of the recent releases on the list are survival games.

There's evidence of a resurgence of interest in arena shooters, but they remain a niche sub-genre for now. Here's hoping that changes.

I enjoy smaller-scale multiplayer games like Overwatch (6v6 PvP) and Deep Rock Galactic (4-player co-op), but I'd also like to see more larger-scale (24-32 players) team-based games with dedicated servers.

If the surge of exploration platformers (a.k.a. "Metroidvania" games), also once a niche sub-genre, in recent years is any indication, then there's still hope for arena shooters and large-scale team-based games yet.

In the meantime, we still have games like Xonotic and TF2!
 
On the subject of dedicated servers, I found this list of games that support player-hosted servers on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41339173-Self-Hosted-Games/

Unfortunately (for me), most of the recent releases on the list are survival games.

Ditto. It's not that I can't enjoy survival games but if I wanted to grind materials for days, sort them into boxes, and use them to make art I would rather clean my house, make real art, and feel better for it. I totally get the appeal of easy game reward loops but it's the fact that it's too easy to fall into them and wake up days later having profited nothing from them. Learning digital art, guitar, the Bible, history and even just playing with Cats seems so much more profitable... now if only I could get past playing with Cats and make myself do the other things the rest of the day.
 
Daggerfall and the original Guild Wars are the biggest ones for me. Though they both had successors, the core gameplay changed significantly in ways I didn't personally find as satisfying.

Probably a lot of it has to do with what makes a great game doesn't always make a great business model. High-satisfaction, minimal-annoyance, long-term replayability games will probably cost a lot more to produce these days than they used to, while being less likely to sell additional expansions, dlc, premium currency, etc., for ongoing revenue.

Not necessarily because the companies are doing something wrong, but because the gaming market currently treats games as a consumer product rather than as a highly-skilled art form. Ie: most customers would rather pay a moderate amount of money on a frequent basis to keep a constant stream of new content coming than make an occasional high-pricetag investment in something truly exceptional that will provide value for years.
 
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