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Blizzard\u2019s Overwatch. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.<\/p>\n
Bosskey\u2019s Lawbreakers. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.<\/p>\n
Epic\u2019s Unreal Tournament. Competitive shooter, fast paced action.<\/p>\n
They all are coming soon. After being all the rage around 2000, the arena shooter is back. But there\u2019s a problem: people watch people play now, and it\u2019s a big deal.<\/p>\n
I watched Overwatch\u2019s 16 \u201cheroes\u201d and you have to appreciate Blizzard\u2019s surgery at work, how things are readable in a chaos of green, blue bullets, force shields, particles and so forth. It\u2019s amazing how good they are at manipulating color palette.<\/p>\n
It is also super fast. It\u2019s pretty much unwatchable for 90% of people if not more. This is what Twitch most watched games are, most of the time:<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/lh3.googleusercontent.com\/-JIBSWshKjRE\/VftOsjipd-I\/AAAAAAAACB8\/nuhiYMGBFQo\/s640-Ic42\/twitch.jpg\")
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Those games are slow. If not reaaaally slow. Titanfall is really good and doesn\u2019t appear here. No Quake. No fast paced games. People compare Team Fortress 2 to Overwatch but TF2 is far slower.<\/p>\n
Game design wise, what makes Counter Strike far better at being watched is the fact that you can be eliminated in one single bullet from any weapon. Therefore you can\u2019t be running around and you can\u2019t be sloppy in your retreats. You have to be always careful and that creates tons of mechanisms: always move with a teammate, be silent, secure a zone with a flash grenade before entering it, think how you can surprise your opponent etc.<\/p>\n
We watch this, we witness this incredible tension that doesn\u2019t exist in arena shooters because everyone is running and blasting everywhere. It\u2019s fun to play but there is virtually no strategy or tactics compared to CS. It\u2019s too fast! Just kill everybody without getting killed. It\u2019s like a football \u2013soccer- game with only the penalty area and only one side.<\/p>\n
The absolute beauty of Counter Strike is its high dynamic: you can rush and play like an arena shooter or you can meticulously form an attack\/defense. Everything can work and everything can fail equally. The economy makes every mistake count \u2013if you lose, you can\u2019t buy good weapons-. Which means that watching a match means you never know who is going to win<\/strong> (when teams are about the same level, obviously). I can\u2019t count how many times I watched a game and thought that it was over no way the other team comes back from that oh shit they are fuck that\u2019s awesome they might win!!!!!<\/em><\/p>\n Sports fans know what I mean. That\u2019s the core element in watching skill-based entertainment: DRAMA. Automatic, endless respawn kind of kills it, by design.<\/p>\n Second thing that makes CS so good for TV purposes: you don\u2019t have to know classes, there are no classes. Overwatch\u2019s 16 different characters with each different abilities is a lot to remember (and I can\u2019t even imagine the work to balance them out). It\u2019s overkill for anyone not heavily involved in the scene. I don\u2019t want to understand all that. Baseball has classes and like four countries in the world like that sport.<\/p>\n I showed a friend a CS game the other day, it was his first time and in 5 minutes he was into it. Very easy to understand and visualize yet, it\u2019s already borderline pace wise when things get hot.<\/p>\n Arena shooters were the shit and disappear for a reason. Counter Strike is continuously in the top 5 sellers on Steam. They sold over a million copies in August, when the major competition took place in Cologne. 1.2 million people watched the finals (and probably another million watched them later) that\u2019s the score of a modest, successful show on TV. No other FPS comes close to those numbers. It took Counter Strike fifteen years and billions of hours played to be that balanced.<\/p>\n If I was a big company trying to get into esports with a shooter, I would copy the fuck out of CS. Just change the anti-middle East theme and you good for years if not decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blizzard\u2019s Overwatch. Competitive shooter, fast paced action. Bosskey\u2019s Lawbreakers. Competitive shooter, fast paced action. Epic\u2019s Unreal Tournament. Competitive shooter, fast paced action. They all are coming soon. After being all the rage around 2000, the arena shooter is back. But there\u2019s a problem: people watch people play now, and it\u2019s a big deal. I watched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2072,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions\/2072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}