Help I need somebody!
Posted: 2008-11-28
Back the in the early days of DOOM people always wanted to play games together, first of all because human nature is highly competitive and there's nothing like beating your friends or complete strangers in an online game. As the game industry evolved to match the tastes and likes of the gaming community, it became apparent that the so-called free for all death-matches just were not going to cut it. Something new and interesting was needed; the first iteration appeared in the form of team death-match where you could now fight together in the common goal of smashing the opposition.
Team based gaming had arrived and variants sprang up, the immensely popular CTF (Capture the Flag) finally gave gamers a goal to strive for and suddenly the first person shooter genre was turned on its head, especially in the early days of Quake.
Now it was possible for a group of friends on or offline (as long as they had a LAN) to challenge the single-player story.
In 1996 Quake saw a revolution in team based games and the grandfather of class-based gaming was born. I'm talking about none other than Team Fortress, written and designed (based on the Quake engine) by: Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley. Team Fortress was a breath of fresh air in a genre that was now dominated by CTF and death-match game-types. It introduced objective based maps with numerous routes. It also brought classes into the first person shooter team-based adversarial experience.
These were fairly well balanced to begin with, with different styles and abilities. The most important innovation was the inclusion of these diverse skills, such as the Demoman's ability to place satchel charges and so on. It meant that a good group of players could concentrate on building a useful skillset in the online game arenas and with effective communication coordinate plans and attack strategies that consisted of more than 'frag the other team'
The Engineer could build defensive turrets to protect key locations from human, or in the case of Quake, the first BOT AI players as well. The Sniper could easily sit at range and cover a long distance access point whilst the other classes all had specific roles to fill. The core death-match/CTF mechanic would never be the same again. This was the beginning of the cooperative game experience that would spread across into numerous mods: such as Action Quake and usher in a new era of competitive gaming.
As the Quake engine matured, changed and shifted, the core gameplay mechanics didn't change. It was up to modders to fill in the gaps again with Quake II and so on.
In 1998 whilst the Quake II mod scene was on fire with mod after mod and Team Fortress was still one of the most popular, Valve gave a stunning entry into the video game market in the form of Half Life, a game that ran on GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake Engine - this engine set the mod scene gibbering with excitement since Valve also proved that they were 100% committed to helping the game community grow. In 1999 amidst a clamour of cheers and hoots the Team Fortress mod was released by Valve as a free addon to Half Life. Once again team based role/class gameplay was king of the servers.
In 1999 Epic and Digital Extremes unleashed Unreal Tournament (10 days before Quake 3) and this brought with it the addictive Assault mode, where the mechanic consisted of attack/defence rounds where the teams flip-flopped so that both sides could play attack/defence and experiment with different tactics on a variety of themed maps. UT also brought with it a variant of Team Fortress that proved to be fairly popular. The main innovation though came with the master of the Reaper bots for Quake, Steve Polge - he was hired to create the bot AI for UT and these bots meant that once again, human players could team up and cooperate against the CPU. This was extremely useful if the host had problems getting enough players together for a proper match.
1999 was also the year of Counter Strike, the mod that later on grew into a fully-fledged stand-alone (Counter Strike: Condition Zero) game that hit in 2004. CS plays upon the team-based round by round objective gameplay of mods like Team Fortress and introduces the player classes as Anti Terrorist Spec Ops and Terrorists, where they must complete an objective or numerous objectives to win the round. Yet the focus was still upon the core mechanics of objectives and death-match, with little love for the people who wanted to complete a game together against the single player story.
Team based gaming had arrived and variants sprang up, the immensely popular CTF (Capture the Flag) finally gave gamers a goal to strive for and suddenly the first person shooter genre was turned on its head, especially in the early days of Quake.
Now it was possible for a group of friends on or offline (as long as they had a LAN) to challenge the single-player story.
In 1996 Quake saw a revolution in team based games and the grandfather of class-based gaming was born. I'm talking about none other than Team Fortress, written and designed (based on the Quake engine) by: Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley. Team Fortress was a breath of fresh air in a genre that was now dominated by CTF and death-match game-types. It introduced objective based maps with numerous routes. It also brought classes into the first person shooter team-based adversarial experience.
These were fairly well balanced to begin with, with different styles and abilities. The most important innovation was the inclusion of these diverse skills, such as the Demoman's ability to place satchel charges and so on. It meant that a good group of players could concentrate on building a useful skillset in the online game arenas and with effective communication coordinate plans and attack strategies that consisted of more than 'frag the other team'
The Engineer could build defensive turrets to protect key locations from human, or in the case of Quake, the first BOT AI players as well. The Sniper could easily sit at range and cover a long distance access point whilst the other classes all had specific roles to fill. The core death-match/CTF mechanic would never be the same again. This was the beginning of the cooperative game experience that would spread across into numerous mods: such as Action Quake and usher in a new era of competitive gaming.
As the Quake engine matured, changed and shifted, the core gameplay mechanics didn't change. It was up to modders to fill in the gaps again with Quake II and so on.
In 1998 whilst the Quake II mod scene was on fire with mod after mod and Team Fortress was still one of the most popular, Valve gave a stunning entry into the video game market in the form of Half Life, a game that ran on GoldSrc, a heavily modified version of the Quake Engine - this engine set the mod scene gibbering with excitement since Valve also proved that they were 100% committed to helping the game community grow. In 1999 amidst a clamour of cheers and hoots the Team Fortress mod was released by Valve as a free addon to Half Life. Once again team based role/class gameplay was king of the servers.
In 1999 Epic and Digital Extremes unleashed Unreal Tournament (10 days before Quake 3) and this brought with it the addictive Assault mode, where the mechanic consisted of attack/defence rounds where the teams flip-flopped so that both sides could play attack/defence and experiment with different tactics on a variety of themed maps. UT also brought with it a variant of Team Fortress that proved to be fairly popular. The main innovation though came with the master of the Reaper bots for Quake, Steve Polge - he was hired to create the bot AI for UT and these bots meant that once again, human players could team up and cooperate against the CPU. This was extremely useful if the host had problems getting enough players together for a proper match.
1999 was also the year of Counter Strike, the mod that later on grew into a fully-fledged stand-alone (Counter Strike: Condition Zero) game that hit in 2004. CS plays upon the team-based round by round objective gameplay of mods like Team Fortress and introduces the player classes as Anti Terrorist Spec Ops and Terrorists, where they must complete an objective or numerous objectives to win the round. Yet the focus was still upon the core mechanics of objectives and death-match, with little love for the people who wanted to complete a game together against the single player story.
