> This is perhaps the central tragedy of fy_iceworld. The game industry benefits from its legacy, but the conditions that spurred its influence no longer exist. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 does not offer a freely downloadable level editor for players to make new custom maps, nor does it allow a decentralized network of player-managed multiplayer servers to distribute these custom maps. We can only play what someone else has decided for us. This climate change has ensured that there will never be another fy_iceworld.
Couldn't agree more. I have a lot of fond memories of playing on stupid custom TF2 maps. In most ways, game development has gotten more accessible by miles over the last few decades, but this is one of a few ways it's gotten less accessible. It's easier than ever to make a full new game, but it's become impossible to make a single simplistic map for an existing shooter that your friends actually play.
Videogames largely moving away from mapping/modding in general has been such a disappointing thing to me for many years now. I'm still playing Doom and Quake mods to this day and some of the content people put out is incredible. Recently an episode 2 for the Quake mod DWELL released and is of unbelievable quality that we couldn't have even imagined playing back in the 90s.
Community servers on the other hand.. those have almost all but vanished completely. It's pretty much just Valve games as far as AAA goes, and even they do their best to hide their server browsers now.
Unfortunately, it just seems like you can't aggressively monetize free content so the industry in general has moved away from allowing it.
I think the world you're describing (and GP as well) is largely relegated to consoles. PC gaming has never been more moddable on average. In many cases, this even includes the exact same titles! For instance Bethesda titles on console range from zero to minimal modding, while on PC those exact same games allow complete and unlimited modding, alongside first party tooling support, to the point that you have entire overhauls of the game that scarcely resemble the original available, for free. Some, like Enderal, even get their own big releases. [1]
Basically gaming splintered, hard. So you end up with people, both living and playing games during the exact same time period, having radically different perspectives on the state of gaming. It's really interesting if you draw parallels between this and the state of bubbles within society in general.
It's true that gaming is split, but its not something that happened recently.
Mapping and modding was never generally available to console gamers, and they've traditionally made up the vast majority of game consumers because high end PCs were much more expensive since PC gaming was a thing.
The only stuff you could genuinely expect a home gamer to do is something like cracking your system protection in the ps2+ era or going ham on the GAMESHARK.
Has it ever been "un-splintered" though? PC and consoles have always been wildly different. The difference is that these days more IP is launched at both markets.
Yeah and it's fantastic that those games still exist and allow things like modding and mapping, however both of those games are a decade old. It does feel somewhat like the trend has died down significantly for newer games, no?
I certainly love them though! I'm still holding out hope for Source 2 SDK and Hammer 2 to actually become a usable tool outside of VR or Dota 2.
Facepunch [0] (Makers of Garry's Mod) are utilizing Source 2 with Valves permission and everything they're working on looks pretty promising, with great potential for a new era of modding.
Heck both of those games ARE mods of other games originally... They also both spawned off massive mods and copies themelves. Anyone remember the autochess craze of '18?
It still exists, for example Trackmania lives and breathes by its editor and user-made maps. I believe Minecraft (probably the most popular video game in the world) also has a thriving modding culture, but I have never interacted with it.
The absolute best gaming I've ever done has been on custom servers with highly invested well run admin culture. It is sad to see that gone. This generation has much better single player experiences though, in a insane variety of aesthetics, so maybe that trade off is acceptable.
A mate and I played for hours on a DukeNukem 3D arena map we found somewhere... I still remember the ballache of getting our modems to dial each other and become connected so the games would see each other
>it's become impossible to make a single simplistic map for an existing shooter that your friends actually play
Counter strike global offensive still has a level editor. Though yeah fewer games nowadays ship with the community servers and mod tools you need to have that kind of organic community. Guess its mostly a problem with the changing monetization strategies where you want to sell microtransaction cosmetics which probably couldn't compete if someone could get whatever goofy modded cosmetics people added to their servers.
One of the few that does. I think with Counter-Strike Global Offensive some of the better community maps get bundled up into events and... something gets sold I think? I don't think it's access to the map (because anyone can download the map) but I'm pretty sure players can pay for something.
I have great news if you're willing to play VR games - PavlovVR is pretty much exactly what you're describing here. It has community servers and can be modded with anything you can put in an unreal engine level (so anything)
It's based on CS so it has all the same weapons and mechanics.
It has an active modding community that has added every map from every game you've ever played (including iceworld, but so many more)
I'm holding out for s&box hopefully being a return to community driven gaming. Garry has a proven track record of shipping games with big audiences (I've personally sunk way too many hours into both Gmod & Rust), and with source 2 as the engine it's looking pretty graphically stunning.
> I have a lot of fond memories of playing on stupid custom TF2 maps.
typical pl_badwater fan vs average koth_trainsawlaser enjoyer
my guilty pleasure was 32v32 fast spawn on the usual payload and a/d standards, with regulars it is a very fun format. Yes, it is highly spammy and teams generally run multiple combos, and that changes up the tactics a lot. A pair of krubered demos (two combos) can break through (mk V.battlefield.wmv) or you can have a really dynamic playing field with very frequent pops. Multiple sentries are common on defense... but you have the krickies. Or you can use short-circuit engineers as minesweepers. With 32 players actually there is a lot more flexing between classes and a whole class of multi-combo plays that become possible, it is a lot of fun on a pub server where anything can happen.
Custom maps (like the one 32v32 all-custom Topnotch clan server) are often balanced better for a larger number of players, but, 32v32 payload was a very fun and intense game format, it's all the fun of pubbing (fun bullshit loadouts because there's lots of room to flex) but just more focused and dynamic. Can you pull off some weird bullshit that pops both their meds? fuck it go for it
The late-game balance changes (iron bomber, air strike, parachute, combo pyro nerf, everything) really all made the game worse in the name of "e-sports matchmaking" that never materialized. I would like to go back to the Love and War update plz, but keep the airblast changes and maybe a very few choice others, but that was peak funhaving and then the nerf bat came down for fun and meme loadouts to make the game "good for esports". Give me TF2014 plz, nocrits.
The decline of the self-hosted instance is tragic, when most of the newer games are gone they're gone. You will never get The Division back or BF1/BFV/2042/etc. Oops server rental program gone. Enjoy ur singleplayer battlefield experience.
Sadly it's also the only way to fight the bot plague, what Valve has allowed to happen to TF2 is disgusting. Can't wait for everyone to migrate to Team Comtress 2.
I once read someone call Touhou "the closest thing to an open-source fandom" and of course there's the "do they make touhou but for BOYS? -> TF2" meme and honestly that's very apropos too, TF2 is one of the latest and most advanced multiplayer games before things really went off the rails, and it's one of the few you can selfhost, it is a common cultural heritage in the way that very little will be afterwards. And now the source is leaked. Behold the strange death and eternal life of team fortress the second, born october 10th, the 2007th of our era. It will outlast hats and inventory and all of us, a powerful memeplex and a really good game.
I do look on it with such mixed emotions though because hats were the prototype for knife skins in CS:GO and that perked everyone else up at the giant wheelbarrows of money steam was bringing in, and that eventually destroyed AAA gaming. TF2 was gambling but it wasn't that predatory (ok grandpa).
I mean yes Valve literally does measure player arousal/stimulation to calibrate the Director in L4D but that's just good game design really.
>The late-game balance changes (iron bomber, air strike, parachute, combo pyro nerf, everything) really all made the game worse in the name of "e-sports matchmaking" that never materialized. I would like to go back to the Love and War update plz, but keep the airblast changes and maybe a very few choice others, but that was peak funhaving and then the nerf bat came down for fun and meme loadouts to make the game "good for esports". Give me TF2014 plz, nocrits.
Amen. I was playing a lot of pyro around that time, getting really good at the airblast + flare combo. Then the update came around which completed changed airblast physics and nerfed a bunch of stuff (imo needlessly) and I stopped playing regularly shortly afterwards. I still run a couple of servers to this day with third party bots but haven't fired up the game for a couple of years now.
The game had already been ruined before 2014. The Mann vs Machine update was not good for the game. Free to play was the end of a lot of social mores that held the game/community together: ex. the backburner was op and nobody used it, if you did, you were ostracized. A month after, the Grordbort update of 2011 was also really bad; the laser weapons were obnoxious and if you had a lower end graphics card, broke the game update for you. Pre 2011 TF2 was completely different, for the better.
I personally liked MvM as a cooperative gamemode which added more depth to the classes in the form of upgrades. Easily accumulated a couple of thousand hours just playing that either on boot camp valve servers or community ones with custom maps and plugins (off the top of my head UberUpgrades and Potato come to mind).
Didn't particularly like mann up as a) it costs money for each tour and b) it heavily incentivized you to win by giving you the chance to win a expensive shiny golden gun, which in return made players just develop some meta which they religiously sticked to and vote kick you for deviating from it even a tiny bit, or god forbid making even the slightest mistake. From my experience most players were in it for those items which they could sell for a profit, actual fun be damned.
MvM isn't the issue; the other changes, like adding the Sentry Buster, were bad for the existing meta on a lot of other modes without adding anything better.
2011 is about when I started playing (although I have a copy from forever ago that I just never got around to, I have the "proof of purchase" in my inventory!) and yeah I'd definitely agree that f2p was the start of the "fortnite-ization" of tf2 where (what would become known as) casual play started to become the focus. I've heard it described as the "saturday morning cartoons of video games": just a silly little game, tune in next week for more fun. actually literally cartoons in the case of the bimonthly (rip) comics.
Before the proliferation of unlocks the game played a lot tighter as an actual game, let's say pre-2011/2012. 2011/2012 to 2015-ish is the saturday-morning cartoons period.
And I'm not saying either "serious game" or "silly little game" is better or worse, just that there's a bit of a tonal shift between, say, the pyro update and pyromania, right?
2015-2016 is maybe the tail of the cartoon period, that's pre-matchmaking, but also they started to have some bad ideas (iron bomber, parachute, air strike, nerfing combo pyro, etc) that made the game overall worse imo. Just a matter of taste but that's where they started circling the drain in design terms and going after some of the fun meme stuff, then later the e-sports thing came in and ruined it.
I think the irony is that the e-sports game they wanted in 2016 is already there, it's the game they had in 2011. But you can't take away people's unlocks and their hats, the things they'd pivoted to with casual made the pivot back to e-sports a lot more difficult, it's a lot harder to remove weapons from the game even if they don't fit what you're trying to make anymore. At best you can try for the "comp/casual" split (not that the split they ended up doing made any sense - 6v6 with no weapon/class limits? 12v12 with funhaving loadouts nerfed? that's the worst of both worlds) but the comp/casual split fractures the community too.
I think the other part of the problem is it's tragically unhip to have a 2007-vintage arena shooter as your e-sports title in 2016. I've heard the take "musk didn't want to own twitter, he wanted to own a network with twitter's size/reach that works and behaves completely different in every way". And tbh Valve didn't want TF2 to be an e-sports title, they wanted a title with TF2's userbase and reach that played completely differently from the thing they had spent the last 5 years turning it into. And then they took the CS:GO devs and tried to cut away the funny meme stuff and turn it back into a serious e-sports game and now it satisfies neither side.
But anyway yeah I completely get the feeling that TF2011 is a thing that a lot of people would like to play too, before things got too silly and too much about the hats/less about the actual game itself. I just also think that's really the serious e-sports game that Valve really wanted in 2015-2016 and they didn't know it.
Would love to see both TF2011 and TF2014. Hell TF2007/2008 would be funny too, let's have 6-pipe demoman and sentries you can't move (pyro kinda needs airblast though).
(actually the Xbox 360 version is frozen in time, because Valve refused to pay Microsoft to validate updates... it has the very first update because you get one free and welp guess that's it!)
As an average scunt main I would to inform you that you are wrong. You say that the pyro nerf was bad. Duck you (politly) pyro is dumb. I hate it when I get spy checked by m1 combo every second stop. Pro play is good game good j_peg #1 pro player, bad water mid, sawmill foeva. Crits make tf2 good I know random crits can be poopy sometimes but it’s funny random crit amazing yes gamim
> As an average scunt main I would to inform you that you are wrong. You say that the pyro nerf was bad. Duck you (politly) pyro is dumb.
average lime scunt main vs typical loch n load enjoyer (oh no I already did that bit)
I loved LnL+sticky+Persian persuader… play with stickies since you have plenty, save the LnL for spamming chokepoints (which is fine since regular GL explodes on impact too) and busting sentries, grind on the engineer’s dead buildings and turn it into three full-health packs.
Wanted more ammo? We had a tool for that: it was called “dying and going back to the respawn room”.
I get that scouts hated the OG two-shot LnL (with a chance of a 1-shot-kill) but scouts also control the engagement because of higher mobility, everyone used atomizer which gave triple jump even while using another weapon (before that was later nerfed), and you get one more jump than I have shots. Plus it’s specifically a “fuck that one class specifically” loadout with a large downside of having to actually hit your shots instead of rollers, and half the ammo loaded. I know that’s a controversial take but LnL was fine imo, if you push the fight and I land two direct hits (or your number comes up on the first pill) on your high-speed mobility class with triple jump that's a mistake on your part. If you want to make it nospread so damage output is fixed and it's guaranteed to take 2 hits... that's fine too, nocrit+nospread is better overall imo.
Same for Pyro. He has a flamethrower and a shotgun, if you as a scout choose to run in and force the fight over open terrain against a pyro who knows you're coming... you die. You can still kill him with two meatshots with no chance of response if you flank him unaware, the flare gun moves slow enough you can dodge. To not die to the shortrange juggle class, don't approach the shortrange juggle class with your mobility class. Skill issue, you have a pistol if you really need to plink on him, he either needs to land flares or use the shotgun, you 100% have the control of the engagement at all times right up until you let yourself approach and be juggled.
But yea modern scorch shot is busted, I think that one's just not fun for anyone, I don't feel good about just blind spamming with AOE fire grenades that block a choke for a couple seconds either. Not sure the current weapon design is saveable for that one, I run it too when I play pyro (because all the rest of pyro's combos have been stripped away) but it's basically a better version of the detonator in the sense of being horrifically annoying to play against for zero effort on the pyro's part. On the other hand, it also forces snipers to at least occasionally interact with the rest of the playing field.
The two I’m really torn on are rescue ranger and short circuit. Short circuit used to be actually fairly important for clearing stickies/etc, I’d use it plenty myself on offense pushing out of the gates etc, even as a demo main I felt it was reasonable (up until you got like three of them just vaporizing everything while they repair or rescue ranger). It went through a number of variations and I’m not sure any of them felt super great but it also did something kinda important and the class is otherwise very weak offensively (except for other unpopular weapons like mini sentry). Not that I like a couple turtled up engies vaporizing my shit but like, uber a heavy or a couple snipers with charged machinas to alpha-strike it, 2 charged shots on a sentry is instadeath even if they're swinging wrenches. That was always the charm of “silly little game” TF2, no matter how fucking lame a given strat was there was always something you could do to break it with an even sillier strategy.
Until the vaccinator came along that is. Like god it was decent to start with and was just buffed incessantly in the last few years. Oh you can trivially swap resists to block any class/loadout variation made to counter you, even pop multiple resists at a time, and oh also the charges now follow the patient so you don't even need to keep healing them? Yea just keep buffing it that's great /s. Meanwhile quickfix was done dirty, airblast immunity on uber was a situational strat for pushing on ramps (thundermountain, upward, etc) and you were vulnerable to damage to offset that, just shoot them till they die (damage, my one weakness!). That was fine, what was the problem?
Rescue ranger is another tough one to balance. I kinda feel like you shouldn’t be able to run both Short Circuit and RR together, that’s maybe a little too much mobility and tankiness for sentries especially when you have a couple engies. Forcing engineers to commit to the nest or walk the sentry out by hand is not a bad thing imo. Maybe that's a thing like the Equalizer where it really should be two weapons - the "repair gun" and the "teleport the sentry" gun... or just not have teleporting sentries.
Iron bomber should not have existed though, non rolling rollers are not a good gameplay idea, but whatever. Same with air strike and the parachute… just doesn't play well overall.
But that’s what I mean is all of the worst decisions came in the last few years of TF2 development. Jungle Inferno was 2017 and the last few years of decisions before that were already downhill, you got scorch shot, vaccinator, quickfix nerf, iron bomber, airstrike, tons of completely random shit that wasn't needed and actually added balance problems in a lot of cases, matchmaking/casual, etc.
2014-2015 was pretty much the apex of “silly little game” TF2.
It was Half Life and people typically used QuArK (Quake Army Knife) an open source tool originally made for Quake 1/2 maps, but Half Life used the same map file format. Later along Valve released Hammer, their own level editor.
The creator of de_dust (amongst others), did some great write ups[0] on how and why he made maps like he did. It’s a lost art now everything is squeezed through playtesting and data analysis.
I wonder with all the people growing up, getting old, becoming game developers, do these people just not care about these old cool features that have gone away that entirely changed the gaming experience for kids?
I remember making friends across multiple age groups in community servers that you could always come back to because someone was kind enough to lease a server for a few bucks a month.
I remember young people creating levels ranging from totally silly to awe inspiring or a combination of both and more, and not to discount other modifications either.
I can only imagine it must be product owners or IP managers somewhere in the org chart saying, "No, we should completely own the join server experience end-to-end," etc.
> Minecraft and Roblox both have creative / extensible outlets built in to them
Not at all the same thing as the community-created content of old.
Roblox is an entirely microtransaction-driven experience, you create games and publish them on the developer's platform so you can charge players for things and make money, not because you simply want to create something for people to enjoy. The developer is in full control at all times and can decide to remove your content at any time.
Minecraft is fundamentally a sandbox game but that's also not really the same thing. You can still run your own servers with your own mods on the original edition but that's just a remnant of the past and Microsoft wants to get rid of that as soon as possible so they can force you to play their version of the game where you pay microtransactions for servers, skins, maps, etc. And besides, most popular java servers have their own set of microtransactions, and there's no server list, so generally you either host your own server for a group of friends only or join a large existing server.
Compare all of this to the classic Valve game concept of loading up a level or script editor because you have an idea and want to make it a reality so other people can enjoy it, not because you think "I can make money out of this". You release your content on the internet for free, others download it, load it up on their servers, and it's now playable by anyone in a few clicks. Players open up a server browser, scroll through a list of servers, pick one they like and join, and suddenly they're playing a player-created map, on a player-hosted server, with player-created plugins providing gameplay and general quality-of-life features, together with other like-minded players. The developers had basically no control over this entire process beyond hosting the server list. No (alive) game released in the past decade replicates this experience because it's simply not as profitable as having full control of the game.
It's especially painful as some of the greediest modern games released (COD franchise) used to have some of the most flexible modding tools I've ever worked with.
COD4 was incredible, could change pretty much everything about it, custom maps, modes, models you name it (here's one I worked on back in the day https://www.moddb.com/mods/cod4-minigames).
I agree Roblox is a cesspit of overly monetized P2W experiences, and minecraft from what I've heard has most its audience on micro transaction (p2w) based servers.
As I mentioned in another comment, fingers crossed s&box can bring back the glory days. Although I worry there's now been a shift in how people play, and the "why" people build things (money, versus personal gratification / fun), similar to how the same thing has happened on Youtube (most people don't seem to create for the fun of it anymore, but rather to make money).
> As I mentioned in another comment, fingers crossed s&box can bring back the glory days
It won't, because it's just trying to be Roblox. You don't create maps, models, or scripts that can be mixed and matched or modified by server owners as they please, you instead create entire self-contained "games" that are then published on a game developer controlled platform and played via a matchmaking service, and the developers have expressed interest in implementing monetization systems directly into the game which means almost every game will be pay2win just like Roblox.
And yes, the climate around content creation on the internet has changed a lot and that's one of the reasons why the "glory days" will never return, very few people still create for the sake of creating without thinking about getting paid.
I'm not sure that's entirely true from what I've read (at-least I really hope it's not), see https://asset.party/ looks like you can download individual parts and create mods / run on your server as you see fit.
I also don't think matchmaking will be a thing, it will be dedicated servers just like gmod & rust. I will be extremely disappointment if not, was hoping we would begin to see 1000+ player modded servers on a game more built for modding from the ground up, as rust has began to experience.
The monetization is an issue, especially since they have no doubt had a taste of it in rust (through cosmetics), so I'm wondering how they can bring this in whilst still allowing full creative freedom, which would in affect make cosmetics useless outside of official servers (which you would assume would be the majority).
> Roblox is an entirely microtransaction-driven experience, you create games and publish them on the developer's platform so you can charge players for things and make money, not because you simply want to create something for people to enjoy. The developer is in full control at all times and can decide to remove your content at any time.
Well people can treat Roblox like this, they don't have to. My children are part of several gaming communities on discord that share and tweak their games 3d models and lua source... There's a ton of people developing just for fun and growing communities on these platforms.
to be fair Valve just continued the trend Carmack/Id started with their engines. Valve made HalfLife as a licensed adaptation of the latest SDK-able Carmack engine
If you're looking for something more modern Elden Ring was an enormous success last year and has a pretty creative modding community. I don't think it can quite compare to Doom, HL, Quake or UT where you effectively got map tools and/or SDK that explicitly supported modding. But these were relatively unique situations where the most popular games happened also to have good support for mods, with the developers often bundling the necessary tools to do so.
It’s definitely going against the grain but what I was trying to say is that there is a surprising amount of modding wherever you look, even in very recent games that you might not otherwise expect. What’s missing is a UT or a Quake - triple-A title with first-party modding - and we were lucky to experience a few titles having this within a few years of each other. But as another commenter said you’ve now got entire engines and asset libraries available at your disposal. Where more indie games like Neon White, Amid Evil or Dusk would back in the 90s/00s probably have been developed as a Quake or Unreal TC, they can now be built from the ground up as a standalone game.
I do miss the days of stumbling upon all sorts of mods on magazine CDs or on FTP sites, for what it’s worth.
In all fairness, I would be hard-pressed to name two games that have been released over the decade of my own youth that have offered a map creator system and have been hugely popular.
Amazing that those are "current trends". Minecraft's first beta released 14 years ago (and it was super hyped right from the start). Roblox is even older at 17 years!
There’s a lot of competition for attention these days. It takes a long time to build a community. Also, someone else mentioned the age of Minecraft and Roblox as if it were a negative thing. But I’m impressed by the ability of these games to stay fresh and relevant literal decades later.
> I wonder with all the people growing up, getting old, becoming game developers, do these people just not care about these old cool features that have gone away that entirely changed the gaming experience for kids?
The game developers care, the problem is management as you said... for a multitude of reasons:
1. companies are afraid of a repeat of GTA Hot Coffee - basically, enraged parents shitstorming because modders (re-)added sexually explicit content
2. central servers can be moderated, whereas allowing users to run their own servers will lead to screenshots of chats where people drop n-bombs or go off brigading and other kinds of trollery, resulting in enraged people shitstorming and the legal department whines about brand safety (for good reasons)
3. having server code publicly available allows malicious actors to go beyond fuzzing in developing exploits and hacking users
4. you can't keep squeezing money out of users when they run their own servers
1. Bohemia built modding into the games. Australians wanted to ban DayZ for a marijuana mod. The shitstorm was minor. And the game was never banned.
Most servers that try to use… distasteful mods… tend to die a fairly fast death once the novelty wears off.
2. Central servers are not moderated. Instead they use BattleEye, which is just awful (2 week lead time to bans, if they even get detected).
Because of that terrible anti-cheat system, it has actually lead to thriving communities which are actively moderated. Where all those sorts of behaviours you describe are often an instant ban offence.
4. No you can’t. You have to grow your user base. DayZ recently reached a new peak in simultaneous player population. Almost 10 years later. This isn’t the first time they’ve hit a new peak over the last year or two either.
Lack of community servers is my personal bone to pick with newer games. Auto-matchmaking is to blame.
When you can join the same server every time you play, it becomes like a third-place, you see the same faces over and over and get to know people. You have fun, everyone is nicer to eachother because they know they will see you again, you pick up on their playstyles etc, a very rich experience.
Auto-matchmaking removes that entirely, every match is with randoms, and everyone gets depersonalized to a nametag and so people start feeling comfortable being the worst to eachother.
Community servers also allowed for small communities to build up around these small maps and game modes, garunteed there was a fy_iceworld 24/7 server where people used to frequent and get to know eachother. Surf maps are anothing thing that would never have happened without community servers/server lists etc.
On the flip side, these days you can download UE or Unity for free and make your own game. Not even from scratch, just throw together a bunch of free assets and have at it.
And it's getting easier and easier, just search Steam for "meme-games". Game development is more democratized than it has ever been.
Look what happened to music production, how easy it is to start with all the free DAWs and cheap hardware. I believe game development is going down the same road, as tools are getting more approachable for newbies, we're going to see an even bigger explosion of indies.
Man I can't wait to retire in 30 years, the games are going to be sick.
> Indeed, I argue that you can witness bits of fy_iceworld’s DNA everywhere, blasted and seeded across the entire landscape of the game industry, as long as you have the blacklight to trace its ropes of influence. Perhaps its most famous direct descendant is Shipment, an official multiplayer map for the original 2007 release (and 2019 remake) of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Today I learned that Shipment from COD is modeled after fy_iceworld! I can’t believe I never put 2 and 2 together. These types of small, hectic maps are always fun. Halo has Octagon variants, COD has Shipment and Nuke Town.
and most interestingly, there is a comment burried in the comments, admitting the he was the original author - and it checks out with the article. It was 15 year old Taiwanese guy. (Who is now a software engineer.)
Wow, that comment and the archive.org link he posted seal it for me. I played fy_iceworld a bunch at my local lan cafe a lot 2002-2003 but never thought that it could be something escaped from the internet cafes of Taiwan made by a 15 year old.
I fondly remember playing fy_iceworld and minor variations of it in netcafes 20 years ago. What made these maps special was that they 1) removed all game strategy - just walk 2 steps to pick up a gun and go fight the enemy, and 2) there were no hiding spots - so no more campers. For kids who could only afford 1 hour of computer time in a netcafe, fy_iceworld was the obvious choice.
I think there are two other factors that people forget.
1) Most (if not all) FPSs at the time (Quake 3, Halflife etc.) had respawn times of around 10s after death. Counter-Strike introduced the idea of rounds which only ended when your whole team died. Scenarios would often play out with 8 players dead watching 2 players camping out the round.
2) IIRC, the default round timer was 5 minutes. This promoted conservative game play which slowed the pace of the game, especially for new players. I stopped playing CS for years but when I came to CS:GO, it was so refreshing that the round timer had been reduced to 3 mins. I spent countless hours being dead watching other people play out rounds.
In online games, there are generally two necessary aspects to "getting good": game knowledge and understanding your opponent. Game knowledge includes game mechanics, which are obviously necessary, but also includes esoteric knowledge like the specific areas in a map that can be exploited just so, or a complex combo with specific spacing in a fight game, etc. Personally, I don't want to spend my limited game time memorizing complex game knowledge. To me, the fun comes from understanding the opponent and using that understanding to beat them: what are their habits, how do they react, how can I trick them, etc. Levels like fy_iceworld are perfect in this regard.
> there are generally two necessary aspects to "getting good": game knowledge and understanding your opponent
At the risk of overcomplicating an astute observation, I'd say that there are actually three aspects: game knowledge, maneuvering, and metagaming. That is to say that the ability to understand your opponent is fundamentally separate from one's ability to effectively foil them.
Iceworld embodies the platonic ideal of a maneuvering test by massively compressesing the total number of possible gamestates into a 3x3 grid of sightlines. The map itself isn't exactly a masterstroke, but it's nonetheless extremely impressive in the way that it manages to avoid collapsing into degenerate gamestates after jettisoning so much complexity.
I generally agree, but the thing with these small maps is that you don't have time to "understand the opponent". Kill times are in the order of seconds, and death comes from every direction. There's no place to hide, strategize, and out think your opponent. In many cases, you can get away with aiming at the enemy's spawn point and rack up a dozen kills in a minute.
At least some CoD maps like Shipment, Shoot House and Rust have a bit more complexity, places to maneuver, and, yes, even camp for a short while. The biggest thrill is always rushing to the top of the tower on Rust, where you feel you have a clear advantage, and conversely, taking revenge on that pesky tower camper.
I haven't played fy_iceworld, but think that boiling that formula down to where there's absolutely no place to hide, removes any strategy at all, and staying alive becomes a matter of luck, rather than skill.
CS struck a great balance between skill floor and skill ceiling, which is one of the reasons I think it was the first blockbuster multiplayer FPS: even if your opponent is a way better player and knows the map, it's still possible to get lucky and win. The same isn't true of games with a higher skill floor like Quake duels*
*RA3, a Quake mod which came out around the same time as CS, lowered the skill floor by giving players a full loadout of weapons and maximum health on spawn. It was good!
Glass floor was a worse (or more amazing depending on your view) version of this kind of map. As the name implies the entire floor was glass panels and suspended over a giant pit with a very ominous look. You could see and fire almost anywhere, including down on the glass as people ran towards you, shattering the panels and watching them drop to their death. But you had to move yourself because everyone else could see and fire on you and the floor under you too. It was a fun change of pace with a lot of anarchy.
Hah that's right, I remember every start usually involved a big volley of grenades tossed out to randomly destroy parts of the floor and wreak havoc on strategy.
While trying to find one of the maps that I could quite vividly the layout of but wasn't recalling the name of, I found that someone has a massive archive of maps that I'm sure some people here will appreciate: https://ar.mevl2.duckdns.org/css/maps/
From there I was able to find what I was looking for by browsing through all the ones with "texture" in their name. It was aim_ag_texture_jungle :) https://gamebanana.com/mods/105659
Ahh good memories - I played a lot to aim_ag_texture2 and it was a very similar layout. I liked that it was small and good for quick rounds or something practice , but not quite the carnagefest of fy_iceworld or aim_map
Iceworld gave you a random weapon and you had to make do - that was a fun twist on the usual CS gameplay, and that’s all it took to be popular. Another genre in this style (possibly an evolution of iceworld itself) is “gun game”, where you all start with the weakest pistol and every kill changes you to the next weapon. This was popular for the same reason, it was a fun twist on the usual gameplay and you played with unfamiliar weapons.
Yeah, I love gungame. It's deathmath style so you respawn pretty much immediately which makes it a lot more fast-paced and interesting instead of dying and having to wait out the round.
There are still a decent number of people playing gungame in CS: Source around me (apparently it's not as good in the newer CS:GO but I don't have that one). It's also mostly people in their thirties so a bit better vibe than when there used to be a lot of annoying people who sound like they're twelve - they mostly seem to be on CS:GO now (not that all teenagers playing games are annoying, just mostly the ones who are on the voice chat a lot).
Gun game servers are where I encountered all sorts of custom maps, including fy_iceworld.
I spent so many hours in high school and into college playing gun game in CS:S. It was very easy to just hop in and have fun. It was a nice alternative to the more serious, team objective oriented modes.
We used to play one with respawns so there'd just be piles of guns everywhere (mainly the corner walls). I think we also had no money restrictions. You could buy whatever you wanted in the buy zone.
>fy_iceworld’s buyzone rests obliviously in the center of the map in a dangerously cramped no man’s land.
>This placement makes it extremely difficult to spend any money, which basically blocks off Counter-Strike’s central progression and loadout system while creating this funny risky incentive to rush into the middle before the buytime closes. 95% of the time, you’ll just get gunned down from 3 different sides. But if you’re lucky, you can run in, buy a grenade, and toss it into the other team’s spawn, and it feels like you’ve gotten away with something.
Not quite. You'd bind your buy script to a key, and after your team killed the last enemy you have a few seconds to run there and hit that key. You keep the grenades in your inventory for the next round.
The custom mapping community of CS 1.6 was truly special, and it's incredible to see how much it has shaped the games we know and love today. Back in those days, community building was as simple as spinning up your own dedicated servers and hosting new maps that everyone could enjoy.
I ran a few popular fun map servers, constantly experimenting with new mods, game/gravity settings, and rotating new maps based on community votes. There was a strong sense of excitement around testing out the latest custom maps, and even the quirky bugs added to the fun.
And it still is - the efforts people still go to to produce Counter-Strike maps, working around the quirks of the various game entities that don't properly reset at the end of a round and so on.
In many cases, specifically working with those kinds of quirks. Being able to persist certain state between rounds in CS using these kinds of bugs has been a godsend for many custom game modes (for me personally, my work with Zombie Escape in CS:S and CS:GO)
iceworld was great. Counter-Strike is a big game with lots of mechanics. Multi-round strategy. Sneaking. Shooting. Teamwork. Objectives. Etc. Iceworld takes all that and focuses on basically a single thing: peeking + shooting. It's great.
I love the history of MOBAs. Warcraft 3 was a big RTS with hero units. Hero units are cool! What if a game focused on just them? This led to hero arenas and eventually DOTA. In Dota you only control the hero but there are still some automatic AI creeps.
Dota is cool. It has lots of mechanics. Hero micro, map control, leveling, gear, solo fights, jungle, team fights, etc. What would be neat? What if there was a mode that focused just on team fights! Forget the first 20 minutes, all team fight all the time. Behold all-random all-mid (ARAM)!
Counter-Strike and DOTA have extremely high skill ceilings. They're also very punishing games to poor players. iceworld and aram lower the stakes, increase variability, and decrease downtime. They're all action all the time. And even bad players can get some kills and have some fun.
I love seeing how a game can produce a mod that becomes a full fledged game which becomes a bonafide subgenre... which gets its own mod and the cycle continues. Beautiful.
The Tower Defense genre was invented in Starcraft custom maps, all the way back to the popular Starship Troopers maps, then Bunker Defense, and so on. MOBAs were invented in Warcraft 3 custom maps with the original DOTA. It's so clear how beneficial it is to any creative sphere to have those rapid development loops, where you can go from having a cool idea to having random strangers playing it within a few days.
There was another really popular Starcraft custom map (genre, really) called "Commandos" where you had a constant spawn rate of marines and could upgrade them into various things; I always thought that was a super fun mode, but it never materialized into a larger genre like Tower Defense and MOBAs did. I wonder if there's a missed (latent) opportunity there?
I didn't do Starcraft, but remember "Footies" maps in WC3 which sounds exactly the same as "Commandos". It was insanely popular, but never lived on like DOTA did. It is sort of funny to think of it as a sort of evolutionary dead end, or maybe it lives on somewhere else?
I think there are a ton of SC (and other RTSes like AOE) mods which are just waiting to be made into standalone games. "Nexus Wars" comes to mind as a favorite. But there were so many, I wish I could remember them.
One of the core skills of CS is peeking and spraying. fy_iceworld just decreases the iteration time while allowing you to chill and talk with friends and train basic skills.
Who decided that "fy_" stands for "fight yard"? Some random in the ingame chat or on AIM told me it stood for "fuck you", and considering the general demographics of people playing and modding CS circa 2002...
In StarCraft Brood War there were normal maps, which were mostly played 1v1. That was the "true" game - it was fun but also quite difficult.
Many players played for fun, so they would play team games e.g. 4v4 where skill still mattered but often the results depended more who you got on your team (I think that to a degree this is why MOBAs are so popular - in theory you get close to a 50-50 winrate, or at least win like 30% games even if you are bad).
Some players enjoyed a map called "Big game hunters" (or BGH for short) where you didnt have to care much about resources - they were abundand in your starting location. So you didnt have to think about building new bases (big part of regular StarCraft gameplay). In fact even more simplified "fastest" maps were made, where resources were stacked near every player's starting point and the map was basically a square with some choke points. The layout was simplistic too. It could still be fun and better player wouod still win. But again most players played team games like 4v4 where you could always blame your loss on your team.
Then the players played a map called "Blood bath" that was incredibly small - so games could be shorter (few minutes), since players would often "rush" (=attack quickly) each other to win or lose fast.
Those simplifications that removed part of the main game loop were still fun. Often by making the game a bit easier. (Although I remember some challenge between "regular" players and "BGH" players wherr BGH players won, since they know how to play BGH and they were good enough to win on a regular map).
Then StarCraft Brood War had thousands of custom games, which had deep ability yo customize the game and a primitive programming language - that allowed to completely change the way the game worked. MOBA genere, turret defence - all came from StarCraft Brood War custom games.
I think that apart from Warcraft3 no other game allowed so much custom maps from the stock (without mods). In Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 3 you would just download the custom map and play it.
Starcraft 2 never managed to get custom maps as popular due to Blizzard's mismanagment: no custom game list. Also Blizzard was probably trying to monetize custom games/maps but failed.
Designers often ignore that (1) there are bad players that still want to win sometimes even due to sheer luck (2) some players want relatively braindead simplistic fun.
I think in Fortnite they have a popular custom map that is a big square arena where both materials and ammo are infinite. Again a simplification, but at the same time a lot of the essence of the game is still there (shooting and building).
I also remember really enjoying these “Champions” customs where you had one strong unit that was modded to be even stronger and you had to progress through a map of obstacles and enemies. It totally took the resources/build part out of the equation and just focused on movement and combat.
IIRC, the entire MOBA genre was actually spawned from a Warcraft 3 custom map (the original DOTA?)
The bummer is, we can still play the single player campaigns of Star/Warcraft but those days of weirdo custom maps are likely gone for good.
The original Defense of the Ancients custom map for Warcraft 3 was heavily influenced by a StarCraft custom map called Aeons of Strife (iirc). It is probably the first proto-MOBA.
It’s true that it was Defense of the Ancients (or more properly, the DotA Allstars variant) that birthed the MOBA genre.
Two UMS ("use map settings" which is what we referred to custom maps as, named after the game settings) maps that I loved and were quite popular on aus-1 (our local non-battle.net server) were variants of "zergling blood" which was somewhat like a tower defence where you had to live against auto-waves of enemies, and various RPG-like games where you controlled one unit to go through a complex map and finish it while levelling up (and changing unit type), often with some choice of upgrades. I have never been someone who liked modding games, but custom experiences like this were so fun. All you had to do was join the lobby and it would automatically download.
Not sure if they work with the recent SC remaster, but I think there was some kind of debacle around it with Warcraft Reforged? It might have been patched in by now.
Warcraft 3 was where DOTA really came from, I played it when it was Aeon of Strife. And there were other similar maps (one was "mechwarrior" and there was also Force Majeure) and some actually hard leveling RPGs that you'd generally die midway through on. Good stuff.
Warcraft 2 to Starcraft to Warcraft 3 is an interesting heritage for League and DOTA that I haven't thought of. This is what happens after 20 years of purebreeding, gross it's deformed and toxic towards humans.
And then the MOBA genetics was crossbred with Team Fortress 2 to produce... Overwatch. A hideous shell of its former self both mematically and in gameplay. Twisted and evil, a dark and toxic degeneracy of the gameplay you once knew and loved.
The success of DOTA might be why Blizzard added a clause[1] to Warcraft 3 Reforged that gives them control of any custom maps.
It's pretty sad to think how generous games used to be to their user base. Both in terms of content and what you could do with that content. Modern games are a much more controlled experience and I think we're all worse off for it.
> Andrew Yoder, an industry level designer who’s worked on Paladins and Warframe, thinks of fy_iceworld in such universal cosmic terms. “fy_iceworld feels like one of those ur-layouts”, says Yoder, “like Doom 2’s Dead Simple or Unreal Tournament's DM-Morbias -- like it came into being as a natural consequence of the game mechanics, inevitably.”
In the same vein I would like to give a mention to the Mac game Marathon’s Waldo World Arena.
In many ways it reminds me of the notorious Jebus Cross[1] template for Heroes of Might and Magic 3 random map generator. It is also super simple, quick, considered unbalanced but occupies around 90% of all competitive HoMM3 streaming.
These types of layouts always appealed to some fundamental part of my brain. The accessibility, repeatability, speed, etc. These experiences are the antithesis of a battle royale or other modern arena shooter. You can literally play for 3 minutes and complete 5-10 logical games. Its almost like a time machine for fun.
I've been working on my own game based upon this style of simple map. I intend to feature this "4-box" layout as my primary competitive arena.
I did come up with something even simpler - a single box in the middle with spawns on opposite corners. Sometimes iceworld is a bit too big... The only logical simplification beyond this would be an empty room with spawns on opposite sides. I am absolutely going to look into what this might play like as well.
Hoping to have something to show HN later this year.
I'm reminded of Divekick, a 2D vs. fighting game that pares the genre down to its barest essentials. Instead of a joystick and six buttons, all movement, offense, and defense is performed with two buttons: Dive and Kick. This is a parody of the easy-to-spam aerial kick coming down on your opponent that is a staple in 2D fighting games (except in this one, it's your only offensive move, and one well-placed kick ends the match), and the whole game parodies other fighters and the FGC in general. But the simplicity of its control scheme admits surprising depth, and new players can learn the basics of fighting game strategy without a lot of distraction by playing it.
I also found the linked follow-up article interesting, where the writer tries to find the original author. Including an article comment at the end of the page by someone who claims it was them, with web archive links. Looks somewhat convincing but I doubt we can ever know for sure.
Also, I think his note about all the .wad files is wrong - from memory, you list all the .wad files you want to use in Hammer's configuration menu somewhere and that entire list gets inserted into every map you make, regardless of whether you use it or not.
Any given video game is more than just the game itself. A video game is a toolkit for making games. To say that a simple map like this isn't in the spirit of the game is missing that it's an entirely different game in its own right, merely built using the same toolkit.
Fond memories of playing this map with surround sound headphones and knowing the exact location of each player. Could even get some kills with my eyes closed.
Never got the appeal and I always wondered why such engaging meatboxes as cs_mini_militia never really caught on (outside my bubble at the time), considering it provided extra dynamic gameplay and rich tactics both.
I always assumed it was "f*k you". But after a little digging, it turns out it's not "fight yard" either. According to this comment (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/community/profile/dmgkyd), the map was created by a 15 year old boy, who called himself Fantasy
> Why the map was prefixed with "fy_"?
Because he didn't know how to put custom texture into maps, nor leave his signature.
The only thing he could do was renaming "cs_iceworld" to "fy_iceworld". "fy" stood for "FantasY".
He made a lot of maps prefixed with "fy_".
Couldn't agree more. I have a lot of fond memories of playing on stupid custom TF2 maps. In most ways, game development has gotten more accessible by miles over the last few decades, but this is one of a few ways it's gotten less accessible. It's easier than ever to make a full new game, but it's become impossible to make a single simplistic map for an existing shooter that your friends actually play.