Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
I believe de_dust2 is likely still the most played FPS map. Not sure which other map could have dethroned it. It can’t be Fortnite since Fortnite changes the map every few months and nowadays makes a new one every year or so.
I guess Blood Gulch from the time when Halo was super popular was a very popular map as well.
Then you also have 2fort from the Team Fortress games.
But yes I would say de_dust2 is very likely still the most played FPS map and it will likely stay that way.
As much as I love all the maps you mentioned, and could probably sketch their layouts from memory, I think Rust and Nuketown from the call of duty series are probably better known by a wide margin. Rust has been featured in 3 different games that had a combined sales of over 2 billion dollars, but even that is small peanuts compared to Nuketown.
Nuketown has been featured in six different games, with 17 total variants of the map existing, and 8 different game modes that are Nuketown maps 24/7.
I’ve played neither Counterstrike nor Call of Duty, but I know de_dust2 by name and can even visualise what it looks like, and I’ve never heard of Rust or Nuketown.
Rust was more of a brawl map than the others. Lots of 1v1 fights, but no where close to the playtime of the other two.
If we count the Nuketown map on Call of Duty mobile (mobile has over a billion downloads) I would have to say that's the winner, but if not de_dust2 is the king. Mirage would also be pretty up there.
Yeah, same was true of me until a couple of years ago when I started playing call of duty with my younger brother to reconnect. At least for me, PC gaming puts me in a massive filter bubble in terms of what you see and hear about, and call of duty, which overwhelmingly sells to consoles, has always been viewed sort of derogatorily.
I think on the flip side, most of my brother's friends I played Call of Duty with probably haven't heard of counterstrike, or Quake, or unreal tournament.
Man if you saw the endless wailing and gnashing of teeth about every single change that happens iteration to iteration you'd be astounded.
The two subfranchises, modern warfare and black ops do generally feel substantially different though. Modern warfare is generally a slog, but black ops can be quite zoomy, especially now that Raven software is working on them.
That's just gaming. It doesn't matter what developers do, some portion of the playerbase will be mad about it. Nerf a thing, someone gets mad, don't nerf it someone else gets mad. I'm sure some people will get mad at both options.
Yeah, the CS skin market is pretty crazy, but its still no where near CoD sized. Black ops 6 turned over $3 billion in revenue, and black ops 7 is expected to sell higher yet.
I find the yearly release model exhausting, honestly. Some people only play Call of Duty and still spend more per year than I do on video games.
I feel like halo was never really big outside the US, I would guess unreal tournament, quake, DoD, CoD, battlefield, all were quite popular in the whole west
Halo was defiantly big outside of the US. I was prime age for gaming when Halo came out and Halo was the most talked about game and everybody loved it.
The X-Box was less common as the first X-Box never really sold all that well. But Halo came out for the PC as well and many people played it.
I have fond memories of 2fort. Desperately wanting to play TF1 on a 14.4K modem from Germany - no European servers meant playing with 500ms ping, which made aiming completely impossible, so I took the pacifist route each time by picking the scout class and then trying to steal the flag unnoticed by coming in through the sewers. It worked sometimes when the server was only half full.
I would just play as medic and camp the enemy spawn room, infecting them as they spawned and watch as they passively infected their teammates. It was great fun (I have since grown as a person). It wasn't long before the enemy spawn rooms would instantly kill you if you entered.
My absolute favorite was always fy_pool_party_v2 I think it was called. Such a perfect map. Every position had a number of elite advantages but also drawbacks.
There have been days where 40M people played Fortnite on a single day. I'm kinda out of the gaming world a bit, but I did not believe when my nephew mentioned it, but it checked out. Given the age range of people who still actively play it, I'm not sure if they've even heard of de_dust2.
The most fun one I've used is that it is my home environment in VR. In 3D it is a weird feeling to walk around and see how all the old sight lines are. I still duck a bit walking past mid doors :)
Yes. I miss how wildly creative shooters used to be. In just UT[2K4] you had the translocator, the shock rifle (with a hidden third firing mode), and movement like wall jumping.
I also liked de_dust more because a well executed T rush to site A was as fun as it got on random servers before voice chat. Was awesome when it all came together and everybody worked together.
I vividly remember the thrill of taking out the entire T rush to site B myself in about two seconds during a clan match (not that high level ;)). It was like dominoes falling down in a neat row. It was quite unexpected to rush to site B; the other four of my team were already at site A.
I really don't like how modern games are played on just a handful of fixed maps where players go through the same memorized motions thousands of times. The way we used to play Quake back in the day was that we had hundreds of maps and played one after the other maybe for few rounds at most. We were coming back only to very few bizarre and fun ones. Game involved finding yourself out in your new environment. It engaged spatial intelligence.
Give me any team vs team games that are played on procedurally generated maps.
Mostly balance issues, I think. Balance matters in pubs.
If dust had the underpass-stairs option from the beginning, and maybe moved the T spawns forward by 1 second, it probably would be just as popular today.
There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans.
I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by something like Fortnite or some other shooter map.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWhxfGq_yk