Deadmatch

Deathmatch: All the rage back during the glorious wars between Id and Epic Games, enjoyed more recently in games like Halo and Half Life 2 Death Match, but these free-for-alls are suddenly much less popular. Why? Did we just get bored of them? Did they stagnate? Although those are both probably true, I think there's a deeper reason. Let's compare good old fashioned Deathmatch with the Team Shooters of today!

WHO DE FUCK WAS DAT

Picture it. You've just revisited Quake Live, and you fancy a game. You join a server called "FFA FR". It's loading. Things are happening. "Waiting for Gamestate". Suddenly you're in, and playing. Armed with the basic chaingun, you've got the worst weapon in the game by a mile. Ahead of you is a rocket launcher. Beyond it, on a high ledge, is a guy with a shotgun. He shoots once. You open fire, keeping him firmly in your sights at all times. He fires again as your bullets patter against his thick armour. Your health is two-thirds depleted. He runs for some health - you must have him by now, surely, he should be seconds from death. Almost at the rocket launcher. He shoots and misses. Almost there! He reaches the health. Fuck! You grab the Rocket Launcher. Yes! You stop firing to switch weapons. Fuck! He shoots you. You die. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

When you spawn again, seconds later, only two be mangled in the centre of a protracted brawl between two bunnyhopping plasma-gunners, you start to wonder why you're not just playing TF2, or even a nice bit of Harvest Moon. The third time you spawn, and get nuked by the BFG, the biggest gun in the game, it's a simple matter of hitting the escape key, clicking "leave this match", and heading over to FMyLife.com

Contrast with TF2, then: You start off in a spawn room, with all the health and ammo you could need, with zero chance of encountering an enemy until you peek out from your supply closet. Chaos and Order.

An "I" in "Meat Pie"

In a deathmatch with 20 people, 19 of you are going to lose. Some of you might be in the top 3, the top 5, or whatever, but almost everybody is losing to somebody. If it was a team game, 10 of you would win. Ten. Now, DM players may argue that this diminishes the role of the individual in a team. It does. Being the player with the highest score in QuakeLive is great. Being the player with the highest score in TF2... maybe you could only get a score like that because of that engie who covered your retreat, or the medic who healed you? If you were a spy, you'd never survive without something to distract your prey. But the same could be said of DM games like Quake Live. I don't know how many times I've filled someone with plasma, only for a stray rocket to claim the kill for someone else. Being number 1 on a DM server means a different thing to being top of a winning TF2 team: The former says, "I can point at people's heads, I can shoot rockets at people's feet, and I can bunnyhop like a motherfucker". The latter suggests you can do all that too, but you're also good at supporting other players.

A new player of QuakeLive can't last very long. At all. I've been playing QIII, the dignified pioneer from which QL's DNA was harvested, for years. I found QL to be very brutal! I tend to ragequit daily! If Lisa played it, she might resent being taught nothing, killed constantly, and taunted relentlessly by people whose interest it is to have you never get better. Maybe it'd spur her on to get better at the game, but it'd be more like her to play something more worth her time.

Nature, or Nurture?

So is this because QL is a deathmatch game, or because it was based on a game made ten years ago? Playing QL, the first thing that springs to mind is "why do I have to pick up all these weapons myself?" Imagine every class in TF2 had to actually find their class weapons? It'd be tedious, and bizarre. A bit like QL. If that changed, though, you'd still spawn dazed in the centre of a brawl. Why not let you cycle through spawn points before selecting one? With that change, QL becomes a game where a fully-armed opponent could spring out at any moment and surprise you; something that an experienced player could get around by memorising the spawn locations. This could be pretty fun, and a lot less daunting for the new player.

So then what? In QL's deathmatch mode, all maps are arenas. They need a few different areas, big jumps, teleports, some lava pits or water channels, secret powerups, that kind of thing. Know what they don't have? Anything else. You can think up new game modes for TF2 in your sleep. Imagine there were 20 flags and more than 1 person could grab one. Imagine a payload game where control points must be captured to raise gates and swivel bridges. Imagine an arena map with hacked rules, so that you can respawn as normal and you get a point for every 30 seconds you control the cap.

Deathmatch can be well designed, it can be instructive and elegant, and it can be fun. It's ultimately a one-trick pony, though. If you get tired of killing people for no reason, DM will exhaust you. If you like that, hell, you can do that in TF2. That's why we have 2fort.