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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

This is actually how old Quake III-era FPS maps used to be. I played Star Trek: Elite Force (and Elite Force II), which were Star Trek-based Quake III games that supported third player multiplayer maps.

You had plenty of maps where the creators tried to match the game's feel, and so many that were completely unrelated. Giant bathrooms where you are the size of a mouse was one of the standouts I remember.

This level of customization is often just something businesses have moved away from allowing. And considering the "condo" problem with Roblox, it's understandable why: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game... (The bathroom map I recall above, had a photo of a topless woman in a hidden area.)

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Custom Quake- and Source-Engine levels are awesome. There's a great YouTube channel that showcases old TF2 maps:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrke_zOuskY

Thanks for sharing! TF2 is frankly the best class-based FPS I’ve ever played.

Padman maps were the ones where you were shrunken. They are one of my all time favorite FPS experiences. The homogenized nature of modern games really makes me miss all the modding that went on. When I was a teenager we made our own maps in Doom1-3. I dabbled in Q1-3 maps but it got a lot less accessible due to learning curve. Doom was perfect because it was 2D.

The Doom mapping/modding community is still very active. I recently played an incredible 'megawad' called Ancient Aliens that includes this wild level that uses the Build engine trick of simulating a two-story level with silent teleporters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_WxLORClZg&list=PLFK2eL5cls...

I had no idea. Maybe I should pick it back up. I remember buying the Deth editor and it came on a few floppies. It was a lot of fun . We made our middle school and high school into maps (didn’t everyone?).

I am glad my kids have Minecraft, but there was something special about that era in my heart. It really taught me the joy of building things I intrinsically value.

The custom maps in CS:S / TF2 were my introduction to this.

So many weird and wacky maps. Maps built to look like spongebob's house, maps to look like mario, so many hours wasted on surf maps.

I'm sad newer games don't support custom maps or servers as much these days.

The problem is many modern games are designed for maximum monetization and a shelf life. You want a community enough to keep people playing til [game name +1] but not past that so people all buy the next one. Allowing players to make custom maps and modes would let them bypass the carefully crafted progression and DLC systems put in place to extract more time and cash.

Dev/publisher consolidation & ballooning AAA budgets due to higher fidelity graphics drove this.

It used to be, you did anything you could to sell more copies of your game, for as long as you could.

Now, the above mostly cannibalizes yourself, since there are so few other publishers around.

I must have been too stick in the mud, I would always find these maps annoying and would jump to another server.

The TF2 toy fort genre of maps were lots of fun.

And who will ever forget Trainsawlaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrltoRnljqc

I really wish I could play the Star Trek: Elite Force single player games again, but I suspect they haven't aged well.

Now I'm having flashbacks to the Battlefield mod community from HS and college. Pirates, Galactic Conquest, Desert Combat, and so many other amazing ones that had a ton of players because of lack of server monetization and developer lock down.

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