[HulkNukem]

https://www.kickstar...y-the-gd-studio

Don't let the first two minutes of the kickstarter video completely put you off; just mute the audio or skip past it to get to the real nitty gritty.
Everyone plays as the same character except with skin customization
Maps can be created in-game and with other players (think kinda like Minecraft except you are making FFA or CTF etc etc maps)
The engine was made from the ground up and they are tweaking the hell out of the physics and balance, there's ex arena pros working on it as well.
I like that the art style and levels are pretty minimal; they aren't overly detailed and its fairly easy to tell where paths lead, there isn't an abundance of useless details that just clog your brain.
It is also going to be highly customizable, even right down to the hud

[Danukem]

Looks pretty sweet, in a generic kind of way. But what's the hook? In a crowded market, it needs something unique to make it stand out.

[deuxsonic]

Aren't there enough arena shooters now? They all have that same bright colorful look too.

[PsychoGoatee]

At least the price ($9 usd) is asking a lot less than most game kickstarters. That said, for an arena shooter, if it doesn't take off and the servers are unpopulated, that's always an issue. Hopefully this game does well.

[leilei]

Catering to "pros" = high entry barrier = dead on arrival.

This was a point I've made with OA for rejecting demands for brightskins, vertexlight, highpicmip etc by default, which led to a couple of blackjack-and-hookers "pro" forks that have currently no active playerbase, while OA still has human players of at least 30 at any point of the day... so I think i'm onto something here. Yes it's true some of these players are just "oh its quake3 but free" baggage, but there's history of insanity iterations of these pro-catering arena shooters being dead already not garnering much more than a handful of IRC scrimmers with no awareness on why their holy "quake"* competitive fps supersubgenre is always dead.


As for Diabotical, their pitch sounds strikingly similar to Reflex but with a strange affixation for spherebots and customizaiton being only skins for spherebots that would lose its appeal fast. The other game piggybacking on the kickstarter's also a little suspect


*- not really Quake but some post-2001 cheatcruft quakeworld - not even quakeworld-era quakeworld when being "pro" just meant you're a rocket jumping dork that knows where the powerups are

[deuxsonic]

I never thought playing a game like this would be much fun. Isn't part of the experience the visuals? It's almost as if they don't really want to play games, where the competitive aspect has completely replaced actually enjoying the game.

[HulkNukem]

The game looks nothing like that though, it still has detail, its just not over bearing it to the point it becomes muddled with the frantic twitch gameplay.
Check out the new Unreal Tournament; once they started adding in detail to the levels, it started losing some of that appeal; sure it looks great, but I don't want a crazy good looking game mixed with a fast paced style, they do not go hand in hand at all.
Or look at Toxikk or the retail Nexuiz. They try to have some detail and end up looking generic.

[deuxsonic]

They can go together. The only requirement is that the visuals not get in the way. All previous UT games were no different, each great-looking for their time.

[Danukem]

Detail is fine as long as gameplay elements such as players and items stand out and can be immediately identified. Also, plenty of things are wrong with that screen in the post above, not just a lack of detail: every single design choice is wrong.

[MetHy]

E-sports is still something closed off to few particular games from big publishers. You need a huge budget and to have acquaintances in the right places to have your game make it into the e-sport scene. I don't think a single game made it just because of its audience, (unless we're talking about the very beginning of e-sports) assuming this one will have an audience.

For instance publishers participate in tournament winning prizes up to millions of dollars to make players interested.

Anyway the game looks everything like a copy of Q3A with weapons directly taken from various FPS.