One of my favourite games in the last decade, Natural Selection, does this really well. When you die, you are put in a respawn queue, and you respawn from infantry portals. The more infantry portals your team has built, the faster the queue is drained, but also the more resources you've spent doing so. There's also a rather expensive option the team commander can trigger that will bring all dead players back to life all at once.
It's a nice way to get people playing instead of sitting around watching, but at the same time placing a cost on dying that simply doesn't exist in most multiplayer shooters today.
Action Quake 2 (and its spin-offs, namely Action Half Life, and its creators went on to make CS), Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear, Rocket Arena (in all of its incarnations), The Specialists. I think the Existence HL mod did this, too?
There are also a number of games that restrict spawning in other ways, mostly by spawn point or territory control: Gloom, Natural Selection, Day of Defeat, Battlefield, etc.
> Death of it? There was Counterstrike, and then...?
Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, America's Army - pretty much the entire "tactical shooter" genre until some of those franchises started moving in on the console casual market.
Not to mention the two console serieses I already listed in the post you responded to, both of which moved multi-million units serving up non-respawn multiplayer.
This. I used to spend hours planning out the team movements through the level.
Dying or being incapacitated was easy (usually 1 shot in most places) so the only way you could really win was to coordinate very well. You'd be given a map and plan the movement sequences of each team through the level. When you gave a specified "gocode", that team would advance to the next checkpoint by running through a corridor or entering a defended room.
Then, you'd interleave the paths so that in larger rooms you'd have multiple teams enter simultaneously for maximum effect, because otherwise your team would usually get bottlenecked at the entry point and die.
Oftentimes, one of the teams would fall behind or die because of bad planning (or insufficient information while planning). But you'd have to keep going anyway, often with disastrous results. This taught you about failure modes and planning with redundancy.
It also taught you about winning the war before it happens. You never ever ever ran into a room guns ablaze. That's a good way to get your entire team killed, and probably the hostage that you're trying to save. Instead, you have one person open the door, another chuck in a flashbang and more to cover you while you get in through the bottleneck. In any reasonable amount of time it would take for your enemies to react, they'd be picked off already. And hopefully the other team did the same on the other side of the room. The whole thing took under 10 seconds. Not much left to chance or shooting ability.
I miss the old Rainbow Six. Obviously I don't shoot people for a living, but it was one of those games that actually taught you something.
Comments
Death of it? There was Counterstrike, and then...?
Call of Duty has a mode similar to Counterstrike (without buying weapons, but the respawn style is similar enough).
I never got into Counterstrike, so maybe I just missed the whole genre, but every shooter I've played in the last (almost) 20 years had respawns.
One of my favourite games in the last decade, Natural Selection, does this really well. When you die, you are put in a respawn queue, and you respawn from infantry portals. The more infantry portals your team has built, the faster the queue is drained, but also the more resources you've spent doing so. There's also a rather expensive option the team commander can trigger that will bring all dead players back to life all at once.
It's a nice way to get people playing instead of sitting around watching, but at the same time placing a cost on dying that simply doesn't exist in most multiplayer shooters today.
There were others before it, too.
Action Quake 2 (and its spin-offs, namely Action Half Life, and its creators went on to make CS), Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear, Rocket Arena (in all of its incarnations), The Specialists. I think the Existence HL mod did this, too?
There are also a number of games that restrict spawning in other ways, mostly by spawn point or territory control: Gloom, Natural Selection, Day of Defeat, Battlefield, etc.
> Death of it? There was Counterstrike, and then...?
Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, America's Army - pretty much the entire "tactical shooter" genre until some of those franchises started moving in on the console casual market.
Not to mention the two console serieses I already listed in the post you responded to, both of which moved multi-million units serving up non-respawn multiplayer.
Rainbow Six.
This. I used to spend hours planning out the team movements through the level.
Dying or being incapacitated was easy (usually 1 shot in most places) so the only way you could really win was to coordinate very well. You'd be given a map and plan the movement sequences of each team through the level. When you gave a specified "gocode", that team would advance to the next checkpoint by running through a corridor or entering a defended room.
Then, you'd interleave the paths so that in larger rooms you'd have multiple teams enter simultaneously for maximum effect, because otherwise your team would usually get bottlenecked at the entry point and die.
Oftentimes, one of the teams would fall behind or die because of bad planning (or insufficient information while planning). But you'd have to keep going anyway, often with disastrous results. This taught you about failure modes and planning with redundancy.
It also taught you about winning the war before it happens. You never ever ever ran into a room guns ablaze. That's a good way to get your entire team killed, and probably the hostage that you're trying to save. Instead, you have one person open the door, another chuck in a flashbang and more to cover you while you get in through the bottleneck. In any reasonable amount of time it would take for your enemies to react, they'd be picked off already. And hopefully the other team did the same on the other side of the room. The whole thing took under 10 seconds. Not much left to chance or shooting ability.
I miss the old Rainbow Six. Obviously I don't shoot people for a living, but it was one of those games that actually taught you something.