Someone said Diablo 2, which i s for PC so I feel the need to be a bit off topic (360) and do my first post that isn't a thread that I've started.
You guys missed out on the greatest multiplayer shooter of all time. Quake 2. If you've played Quake 2, you probably played the single player for PSX, N64, or PC. Don't let this fool you. This is the reason that Q3 was multiplayer only. Quake 2 was designed to be multiplayer and the single player was thrown in becuase a 'multiplayer only' game sounded blasphemous at the time.
So why is Quake 2 so great?
Quake 1 was the first game to do mods. When I say mods, I don't mean new graphics, levels, sounds, weapons, etc.. Quake 1 did have but it also introduced a new concept with QuakeC, the ability to change the actual gameplay by providing the multiplayer source code.
Now, it would seem that this made people go crazy and release some crazy mods.. and that was true on the small scale. The original Team Fortress was released for Quake 1 for example. Most people tend to think that Team Fortress 2 is a sequel to Team Fortress: Classic, but TF:C is actually a REMAKE of the original Quake 1 mod for Half-Life. TF:C was only marginally better, it didn't change much.. the only real reason it was made (thankfully still) was to bring back TF to the limelight.
Also notible that I remember for Q1 were Capture the Flag for the first time (threewave), Quake Rally, Painkiller... and a whole bunch of neat single player mods. It was a market that hadn't really emerged yet. Near the end of it's time people finally started to realize that mods didn't just change small details of the game, but that you could do a whole new game type.. They found this out right around the release of:
Dun dunn... Quake 2. You can see, just by it coming out at the right time, that it would be an plorethra of mods (If somone knows how to spell that, please lt me know. I couldn't use google to check) Just by coming out at the tail end of realizing what was possible with this new idea of 'modding' with source code Quake 2 was released and came with a more functional source code instead of scripting language.
There were hundreds of mods, 20-30 or so of which were Counter-Strike in quality and scope. Counter-Strike was acutally heavily influenced by Action-Quake 2 which introduced the 'die and wait for everyone else' model.
Quake 2 had the only version of Capture the Flag that I've ever considered an actual 'mod'. It wasn't the first, but to this day it is the best. Loki's Minions Capture the Flag. It had the greatest level design I've ever seen in a game. Ever. Huge, huge levels that were epic in scale. Falling 200 feet and swinging with your grappling hook through a canyon? Yeah. It had it.
But the big mods, the ones that changed the entire game play were Gloom, an alien vs. humans mod which added RTS/RPG elements so that you could build a base to defend and attack.
Quake 2 Paintball, of which there was a stand alone client released a few years ago for free online. This can best be described Counter Strike with really creative outdoor courses and paintball guns that actually curve the balls as they fly through the air realistically due to gravity. This mod can never be described to do it glory. There are a few paintball games available, all are terrible. This mod..was so good, so addictive.. I'm not even sure it could be recreated today well.
QPong (yes, Quake Pong) was a 'pong' mod for Quake 2 which took two teams and a 'stadium' maps that were two teams..and HUGE Balls with spikes on them that were 4-5 times as tall as the player. You had to shoot them into the other teams goal. Nothing was more scary than hearing a rolling sound and looking behind you and seeing a towering ball with spikes on it. When it ran over people it left blood on the ball.
How about a flight sim type mod? Got it.
Or Rocket Arena? Got it.
There were many, many more. King of the Hill started here, Freeze Tag started here, ... most people don't realize these simple gameplay types came from Quake 2. It's the bigger mods that I miss that have never been done justice.
There was even an olympics mod created that was an obsticle course that required you, specifically, to do all sorts of crazy stunts.. much like you see people doing with Halo and exploiting the game to launch trucks and such.. except this was scored. They had .. rocket jumping 300 or 400 feet in the air, landing and going even higher, jumping across canyons.. All sorts of things.
I'm missing a lot of the big ones, but I am running out of space. The point of this is that, while some were pretty simple gameplay changes like King of the Hill or Freeze Tag, there were literally 20 or 30 mods that were huge and were basically their own game. Paintball came with its own sounds, graphics, maps, weapons, code, and so did LMCTF and most of them. Quake 2 had some of the most balanced weapons by default that all just 'felt right' and worked in almost any mod.
No game has came close to this mod explosion to this day. Half-Life had a few pretty notable ones, Unreal Tournament had some, NO FPS has had anything like it.. not even any of the Quake games that were released. It all came together right at the right time. People were getting broadband for the first time RIGHT WHEN the mod scene started at the END of Quake 1s time. It was that mix of 'holy **** and 'we can do whatever we want?' for the first time that outputted this orgy of mods.
Sorry if this was redundant. I would tell you to check out the Quake 2 mods themself but unfortunately people aren't playing most of them. I've been thinking about trying to create a revival of it for the longest time.. but sadly I think people have moved on. Yes, there will be a day when people don't play Halo anymore either, sadly.
Oh, and I've heard a lot of people say that the Quake games suck. These people typically have played the console ports, single player only, or weren't around during the games hay-day. The Quake games were always meant to be multiplayer. This is why Q3 was finally multiplayer ONLY. Q3 was a way to play multiplayer easily as back in the day you had to bring down the console with ~ and type in connect IPAddress to connect to a server. The average computer user didn't know how to do this and thus missed out on the whole experiance. Also, I went to google and typed in "Quake 2 mods" and the first page was moddb.com which says that Q2 wasn't modded as much as Q1 or Q3. .. This can't be true. The majority of 'mods' for q1 or q3 are simple change the graphics, sounds or maps type gameplay changes.
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