Are arena shooters dead?

[GhostCow]

I've been having the itch to play some good old fashioned deathmatch but I don't know of any decent games like that these days. I'm really bummed that the UT remake up and died without going anywhere. Is there anything else like good old Q3A or UT to play these days?

Seems like all the shooters these days are this slow paced realistic garbage with iron sights and I hate that shit. The closest thing to what I want that I know of is Fortnite but I'm not into the whole battle royale thing.

Bonus: Any games like old school Tribes Renegades or TF2 from back before they shit it up with hats and F2P?

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Splitgate maybe

 

[SharkClub]

Everyone talks about wanting them and wanting to play them but nobody actually wants them or wants to play them when one gets released (Reflex, Toxikk, Diabotical, etc.). So yes, they're dead.

 

[GhostCow]

Everyone talks about wanting them and wanting to play them but nobody actually wants them or wants to play them when one gets released (Reflex, Toxikk, Diabotical, etc.). So yes, they're dead.

I've never heard of a single one of those games so that might be part of the problem

 

[Arbaces]

The last high profile arena shooter release I can think of was Diabotical, which I didn't play because it was VQ3 movement, only slight tweaks on the quake arsenal, and had terrible performance on AMD GPUs. It was also Epic Exclusive, which I'm sure didn't really help its playerbase. I too wish fortnite hadn't killed UT4. UT had the perfect arena shooter format, no canonized movement bugs that raise barrier to entry to absurd heights. If you're just talking about fast paced, vertical gameplay and not necessarily the item collection of an arena shooter, then Titanfall 2 might interest you. It's more than just CoD with giant robots for kill streaks. It's on life support, but the steam "release" (it still uses origin) injected a fresh batch of players like EA executives drinking the blood of children to stay young.

As for team games: there was a new version of qwtf that made some waves in the news called FortressOne, but I never played much of the original and can't say how many players there are. I'll also take this space to recommend Dystopia, a source mod free on Steam, for its hectic loadout based team gameplay. The maps are harder to learn than in most objective based team games, but it has cyberspace as a gravity defying quake holy trinity duel and tight meatspace shooting. Pubs are very dead, but there are noob friendly pick up games regularly.

Everyone talks about wanting them and wanting to play them but nobody actually wants them or wants to play them when one gets released (Reflex, Toxikk, Diabotical, etc.). So yes, they're dead.

I think this is unfortunately correct. It seems like the arena shooter community likes lamenting being a dead genre more than addressing the reasons they are dead: high barrier to entry, players who haven't touched a different game in decades, etc. Every new game that is original is met with "we wanted it more like classics" and every game like the classics is met with "meh we already have [original game]". This is the ultimate fate of arena shooters:

 

[Cosmic]

Get Halo: The Master Chief Collection for PC and play the old(er) titles. They are not pure arena shooters, but they are not modern shooters, either. They have exotic weapons and no sprint, iron sights, or realism. They don't take themselves too seriously. All of them have a toggle that hides cosmetics, so player characters can look the same. The newer ones implement some more modern features.

Everyone talks about wanting them and wanting to play them but nobody actually wants them or wants to play them when one gets released (Reflex, Toxikk, Diabotical, etc.). So yes, they're dead.

I wanted to play Toxikk but it tanked right after release. We need an area shooter that will be accessible enough for newbies, while not deviating from the original formula too much.