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The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 15thThe past and future of video games
The past and future of video games
Image credit:RPS
Image credit:RPS
Today’s advent calendar window is a window upon Xmas past. It returns us to the days of LAN parties and dial-up, of demo discs and Fileplanet – a more innocent era, before multiplayer shooters fell under the spell of progression. Not that innocent, maybe. There were plenty of arseholes back then. Some of them now run very large software companies. But at least there was no grinding to ruin your bunnyhopping.
But of course, it’s…Straftat!
The layouts are somehow both exquisite and disposable: you can burn through them all like popcorn, leaning into their borderline-gimmicky sightlines, or chew one of them over slowly, enjoying the ambience as you would the scenery in the developers’ previous single player exploration gameBabbdi. The guns are irresistible, lending themselves to obvious playstyles. One map gives you a bunch of single-shot rifles and teleportation doors perched on exposed gantries. Another is a small maze of dour Backroom wallpaper abundant in laser mines, with a broadsword tucked away in a crawlspace. The 1v1 format creates a degree of intimacy that feels exotic today, more fighting game than FPS. People are going to cuss you out in the chatbox, but it’s sort of fun. Cosy, even!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Lemaitre BrosImage credit:Lemaitre Bros
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Lemaitre Bros
Image credit:Lemaitre Bros
Brendy:Cussed out in the chatbox? Not me! I played Straftat for 20 minutes one evening and faced off against a polite killer who uzi’d me to pieces many many times between frequent pauses to chit-chat about the game. I felt like I had been flung back in time to playing multiplayer Soldier Of Fortune on semi-abandoned servers via a questionable modem connection. But yes, Edwin is right. There is something pure and beautiful about these tiny maps. It was enough to make me go back and finally play Babbdi. Which itself took 40 minutes. That’s two amazing games scarfed down in a single hour. AND THEY’RE BOTH FREE. It is absolutely bonkers. What the hell are these fraternal fraggers drinking?
Graham:My favourite part ofQuake, its sequels and its offshoots,Half-Lifeincluded, was not the games themselves but the culture that developed around them. As a teenager, I hunkered down on dedicated servers, IRC rooms, and messageboards, chatting with strangers and eagerly downloading the folk art these communities produced. That mostly meant user-made levels, and mostly crude, gimmicky, throwaway levels at that.
In fairness, the games themselves usually contained more than a few such levels, anyway. Crossfire, in Half-Life deathmatch, which featured a button that when pressed would nuke everyone on the map who failed to run inside a bunker before the door closed, for example, or Facing Worlds and 2Fort, which inevitably devolved into stalemate sniping battles, or the mirrored islands of Quake 3’s The Very End Of You. All of these maps were hopelessly imbalanced or borderline unfair, producing repetitive and occasionally frustrating experiences. They were also thrilling, dramatic, and often especially wonderful in one-on-one fights.
The trend of shipping a multiplayer game with a big jumble of levels and leaving the community to pick their favourites is long over. Today, developers favour providing either a single level as balanced as a football pitch, or they prefer to choose the level-of-the-moment themselves, turning modes and maps off and on to railroad the playerbase this way or that. Should anything imbalanced slip through the developers' own testing, it’s quickly sanded down or sent to the attic to appease the sharpest edge of the playerbase.
Headback to the advent calendarto open another door!
