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Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

UT2k4 deserves to live, but if we're being honest, there weren't a lot of people playing it during the last decade and a half. I wonder if being able to play it in a browser would actually improve that.

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Even the latest UT on UE4 had like few hundreds of players at best.

Seems like the genre is just not popular.

With the genre being FPS, or what?

I'm not really a gamer. When I discovered original UT I'd play it at work because my home computers never had good enough graphics. I loved the atmosphere of many user-created maps.

Is there no similar experience that's popular today?

Arena FPS of the Quake/UT era have been supplanted by CoD-style tactical shooters, slower team-based FPS like Halo, hero shooters like Overwatch, and battle royale shooters like Apex Legends. I don’t think a popular pure arena shooter exists today. (Though Splitgate and, to a lesser extent, Halo Infinite scratch the same itch for me.)

I’m optimistic, though. Adventure games were dead for a while but eventually came back with a vengeance. I doubt the desire for quick, pure shooty fun will ever go away.

I had played UT2k4 almost exclusively for months before ever trying halo, since I didn't own a console. I eventually played at a get together at a friend's house and genuinely couldn't understand why Halo was so popular- the speed was so slow.

I eventually appreciated it a bit more, but UT will always have a special place in my heart.

Thanks for the reply. What is a "battle royale shooter?"

Generally a mass player "there can only be one" fight to the death last player standing wins game.

As opposed to, say, team orientated Capture the Flag scenario's.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Royale_(film)

Hm, OK. From my limited gaming experience, I find that I do enjoy CTF-style scenarios more.

Unfortunately a fad that's been around since 2016/2017 or so. The largest one is probably Fortnite BR, they tend to have a few million monthly active users.. although whenever there's an event there's a lot more who just log in for the event. Typically a BR is one person (or one duo or one squad, etc) vs everyone else. No one respawns, except for specific exceptions, and the last person/squad/whatever standing wins. There's an official team deathmatch type mode as well but the children tend to scoff at it as if it's just training wheels for "the real mode" instead of realizing that it's more fun to have respawn than to not have it.

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