As it stands right now, the Arena genre is a little quiet. Quake Live is the biggest game going at the minute, and while UT2k4 still has people playing it, competitively it's almost dead (although there is a $2000 tournament coming up soon.) The genre is without a doubt on life support and looking likely to collapse on itself at any moment. Quake Live was meant to be the saviour of the arena genre, but it's awkward payment systems and issues on launch helped to keep people away. Even now it doesn't state that you can pay monthly until you actually get to the payment page, it still advertises everywhere that everything is billed annually.
But sadly what alternatives have there been recently? The most recent AAA studio title was UT3, which was fairly poor on release, riddled with issues and lacking basic functions such as demo support. Then there was Nexuiz built on CryEngine 3. This game had potential, but it's power-up system was awkward and very RNG, and the game looked TOO good. It was just a blur of colours and shine, which is great for a tech demo but in a fast paced shooter you need to be able to see your enemy. You don't have long to spot them before they are out of your range. Also on release it didn't have dedicated servers and only ran through a p2p system, which in a fast paced twitch shooter is the fastest way to make your game DoA.
Everything else that has come along has been a small side project, practically unheard of, and can usually be summed up as "Quake 3 Free Edition". Most of the games are built on an open source version of an id engine and sadly stick to the engine like glue and use nearly the exact same weapons with just new skins. War§ow is the exception here, and while it has some new functions such as it's double ammo system, they don't really seem to fit as well. Overall though the game flows well and has potential once it hits Steam later on this year. It's biggest issue will be the same as every other arena shooter though. The game has already been out a while and has veterans who know the maps off by heart and will destroy any new player. Unless it comes out with a solid matchmaking system it's safe to say the game will disappear faster than it appears.
So the genre is as good as dead right? Well not exactly no.
Back in 2012 James "2GD" Harding announced his upcoming project "Reborn" which will be an arena shooter. With 2GD most well known for his Quake 4 play as a player, it's probably a good idea to assume that the play style will be based on either vanilla Q3 or Q4. However so far we haven't heard much on the project, other than it's still under way, even though we did get a preview of the HUD a few days ago.
While it's not much to go on, and looks like it's taken straight out of an Adobe program as opposed from the game it's something. 2GD is a good bet if we are to see anything though, as he has the contacts within the gaming world to release something solid and competitive out of the box. This is certainly a project I will be following if anything ever comes out of it. He isn't the only big name stepping into the arena this year though.
Cliffy B, one of the early UT developers recently announced that he is wanting to start a new arena shooter now that he has left Epic Games. I suppose I should be happy that a huge name developer will be developing a new shooter, but since the last UT released was in 2007 and UT3 I can't say I'm overly confident. Since then he has worked on Gears of War and Bulletstorm, neither of which I would have put down as a solid competitive shooter nor arena shooters. However if he has left Epic Games, he clearly feels the same way and had some strong words to say on the subject.
The final project that was announced only a month ago is Reflex, a title developed by Newborn an ex developer of the CPMA mod for Quake 3. At first I was worried about this title, as so many CPM clones have come out recently, I wasn't sure if we really needed another one to come out and die on release. However Newborn seems to understand what's going wrong, and is working to keep the game on the right track and open the game up for the casual audience which is something we rarely see but is the key to success. He's also produced the most content so far for the audience to see with a video of the movement. As it stands we know little about the game since it was only announced a month ago and they don't want to promise anything yet. All we know is that the game will feature air-movement and an inbuilt editor as can be seen in the video below. I will take a look a little more in-depth into the game over the next few days and try and break down the Q&A session that Newborn had recently.
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