Eh, "boomer shooters" died along side with Halo and LAN parties. Minecraft was the final nail in the coffin.
The knack and knowledge of hosting a dedicated server required skills. If you could one click button host a Quake 3 Arena server or UT, there would still be sort of a crowd.
But not only that, if you were new: servers got toxic with the same grumpy players knowing every single trick in the map to one-shot kill you with a rail gun. It got frustrating playing the same bloody map each map change. "Oh yay, it's cs_office again" /s
The whole genre got stale and never has been successfully reignited. As Discord to TeamSpeak; same misfortune.
Fortnite killed Team Fortress, Overwatch killed Halo and Minecraft was the new digital lego. None of them required such a skill to play or host the game. It was refreshing for it's time.
Not forgetting it was the upcoming of a new crowd of folk and as generations go, the old cards topple.
Who hosted an BBS when the internet came to be?
IRC today is pretty much stuck in dinosaur country and XMPP/Jabber never got a product which then was further nailed shut by Google & Co.
It was epic fun for the era but it had a death bed waiting.
I've never understood the appeal of the opposite. Modern gaming where you just play with different randos every round.
When I was a kid playing Quake 3 I had different servers bookmarked, knew the players that ran the servers and the general crowd that hung around. Had friendships and rivalries.
Modern multiplayer you may as well be playing bots. There's no community.
Xonotic has that old school feeling. It's an unfortunately tiny player base, and only a handful of servers with regular players. But if you are within ping of a busy server (like Jeff & Julius resurrection) you do run into the same people all the time, including the ones that run the servers.
All of the things you mentioned still exist, they are just not mainstream. And maybe that's for the best. Small friendly communities keep them alive, not companies that need to keep messing with a working thing in order to justify a monthly subscription or ad revenue.
Wut? We're in a Renaissance of boomer shooters right now. There's like hundreds of new ones and it's a popular category. Just check out civvie11's channel if you disbelieve.
They're just all single player focused.
Single player maybe, but that's nothing compared to the likes of UT or Quake.
I don't know about that. I've pretty continuously been playing games like UT99, UT2k4, Quake (specifically Quake Fortress), TFC, AvP2 since release. Even things like Space Station 13 and King Arthur's Gold.
It's not the only thing going anymore, but also people have orders of magnitude more choices. That's the thing that's missing today. Nothing is "dead", there's just too much competition now.
Honestly the aforementioned games have had much more staying power than more recent multiplayer games. And they're mostly played by old men like me.
I haven't fired up UT99, UT2K4 or any of the Quakes for decades. Are there active servers where you could get a good DM session?
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