>>1014949
There's a simple reason arena shooters (quake3, unreal, and.... what else?) died - they weren't fun after a while. I know this might shock nostalgia fags here but the gameplay itself is competition first, team coordination second, and "fun" at the very bottom. It was tryhard central, and the most fun I had was during early days when the server was populated mostly by average players, with 1-2 above average on both teams. You can shoot, miss, fuck around, try getting the lightning gun, die and try again. But once you have a railgun god no-lifer join the server, you might as well quit. Because he alone dominates the entire game and you can't do shit against him. Oh and good luck if he was with his clan on mirc. No fun in playing the game then.
Once you had one tryhard join in teh entire server dynamic changed. You too had to tryhard just to stay alive and play. Oh and once those tryhard clan force maps to be just 4 of their favorite comp maps, that server is gone forever, No more longest yard, temple all day. No ctf, dm only, for their daily server clearing. Ctf servers lasted a little longer, because the objective means you can atleast camp or contribute in other ways than raw skill. So atleast somewhat fun.
UT was way more fun than q3 simply because of weapons, but even it failed to innovate its stale formula of shoot faster, move faster, get items first. Its other game modes slowly faded away too with the loyalists only prefering the "meta" weapons, "meta" maps. Actually this pattern repeats in every Deathmatch game that focused on raw gameplay alone(unless you had a really chill server). Same shit with latest Xonotic. The same autist loyalist purist "I want a REAL arena shooter NOW" fags took over and everyone suffered. Fun for the first few days, then tryhards joined in, no-lifer drama started because they take the game way too seriously. Fun disappears, new players disappears, the supposed loyalists go back their q3 server with 5 players.
Newer games with "unbalanced" gameplay replaced them, ironically. I experienced this first with Cod2. Bolt-action rifles and smgs were nothing infront of a shotgun or panzerschrek, you were actively discouraged to tryhard. Because being a server vet means nothing when a single rocket or shotgun destroys you, Im sure UO players feel the same with their vehicle and all the fun they had. There was a comp scene in cod2 too but it was very niche.
Finally competitive gaming. It didn't destroy fun in arena shooters, but definitely accelerated it. Scrims and scrimfags everywhere. With the biggest and most fragile ego.
The most fun I had with quake3 was in a ctf server with most chill and average skilled players who talked shit and weren't taking game seriously. That's were I honed my fps skills and im afraid it'll never happen again with new generation