Sit around children, let me tell you a story about Hi-Rez, the parent who poisons their children in the night.
Hi-Rez makes games, good ones, then eventually makes them terrible ones through neglect, incompetence, malice, intent or pursuit of popular trends as of lately.
Look at their first game, Global Agenda. GA was Hirez looking at things like Team Fortress 2 and Monday Night Combat and thinking "we can do that, what if it were futuristic, but also we gave everyone a jetpack?". Was it as polished as Team Fortress or MNC? Not one bit, but it had things helping it stand out from either game.
First, everything in GA was projectile. Your minigun? Projectile. Your sniper rifle? Projectile, lead that shit. Your assault rifle? Projectile, LEAD THAT SHIT.
Next, GA was kind of a pseudo MMO where the whole shtick(or rather, the whole marketing campaign) was that it was purely PvP. This, while being a fair source of jank, was also a fair source of good shit. Things like build variety, because why be a healslut medic when you can be a fuckin plague doctor running around poisoning everything and everyone? Why be heavy weapons guy tank mowing down inferior women in hot skintight power armor when you can run around with a rocket launcher and shields?
Why be a faggy sniper(or not so faggy because the whole projectiles deal actually required a lot of skill from recons) when you can go around with an invisiblity cloak and an SMG/edgy sword ruining everyone's day with debuffs and catching people off guard, playing counter recon against both snipers and cloakers, supporting your assault/medic, and being credit to team?
Maybe you just want to run around putting up shields and turrets while using a shotgun and a big fuckoff mace. Another thing being psuedoMMO brought to the game was TTK. This wasn't a game where you can round a corner and get one shot, this was a game where you could have long, tense drawn out fights where winning was decided by skill, not by who shot first.
Finally the best part about GA was the mobility. This was a game where even the heavy assault class moved quick with decent movespeed and everyone had a jetpack. But the jetpack wasn't just an extended jump, they knew better. The jetpack had two special properties.
First, it was an equip-able item that you had to use before it activated. There was eventually a hands free update for it because apparently quick switching weapons was hard for faggots.
The second and more important aspect is that they did not allow you to fire while they were on. This meant skilled players could rocket up in the air where they had a good look on things, and then while they were falling, they could lead their shots to rain death from above while having a better view of everything(This included snipers getting away from assailants). This was the whole meat of the game that gave it nothing but mobility fights since standing still was a death sentence.
>So if GA is so good, why haven't I heard of it?
You haven't heard of it. Hirez being at the time a small studio meant they had shit all in terms of marketing budget and had nothing to go on besides that whole no-elves(no PvE) stunt which barely reached anyone. Then by the time the game reached steam F2P it was already ruined by a godawful, grindy PvE system and literal p2w crescent jetpacks that were more efficient than normal jetpacks and also allowed you to fire while in use because again, depth is for meanie heads or something.(You could buy those jetpacks using PvE currency but that took a decade to accumulate).