>>14970866
>If fighting games can make different player characters with different playstyles, statistics and abilities competitively viable, why can't arena shooters?
Because Quakefags only want a re-skin of Quake and nothing else, something that they also won't bother with since "why change to something that's just the same?" too. In short, they want what they already have, ence why nobody can ever give it to them.
These threads always go the same way, "pros" telling you that every attempt at the genre is terrible, but when prompted for suggestions to improve, it's either generic\abstract ideas or the traditional cop-out "you can't improve perfection".
The reality is that you can indeed have something like this, but you need a metric fuckton of balance to do right, something Bethesda clearily didn't do.
Balancing fast&weak vs slow&tough for instance: if the game is dominated by hitscan then large open areas will nullify a lot of the advantages speed gives you (hiding, flanking) while interiors will make it easier to outmaneuver the slow classes. but if it's projectiles, it's essentially the reverse.
So making maps for this when the two main weapons in the game are the rocket launcher and the railgun is quite the nightmare.
You'd need abilities that favour a particular playstyle over another, letting the player have an easier time playing the way he likes while also introducing a weakness that his oponent can exploit.
For instance, the Nightmare race (in UT2K4 Species Mutator) regained health up to 100 when dealing damage. This rewarded being very offensive with weapons you could fire fast, consistently and with good aim like Minigun, Link Gun (if you could lead with it) or the Shock Rifle.
But at the same time, you'd often leave the health pickups for your oponents, you were dependant on decent aiming too and you could easily overcommit.
Or simpler things like the Egyptian race having more air control, which gave them an advantage using rocket launchers and also avoid them but leaving them exposed to hitscan and flak.