I found the above video in a thread commenting on STAR_’s foray into Team Fortress Classic (and Bananaland). They at least had the perspective to acknowledge that the video was funny and giving attention to the game, even if highlighted some of its worst aspects (Bananaland). But there was still a lot of the grumbling.
The reasons given for the death of this style of movement are generally that first person shooters took a big shift towards gritty realism, especially as they moved to the console (true), and that Gabe Newell of Valve hated bunnyhopping and regarded it as a bug to be fixed (also true). But the second reason is more a symptom than a cause, and the first is an oversimplification of a larger trend, which is that showing up to an FPS in the days of once upon a time fucking sucked.
The video devotes a lot of time to the Half Life 1 mod, “Natural Selection”, and the particulars of how each class had a particular style of movement that gave the game a lot of depth, but required practice. But imagine logging into that game for the first time: not only are you going to be destroyed (as you ought), but other players are going to be mad at you for not knowing how to walk.
What these older gamers mourn is the lowering of the skill ceiling for mobility in these games. What they might not see are the older games’ skill floors, and just how freaking weird some of this stuff is. Why should you be able to move faster by clinging to a wall? Or by bobbing left and right as you run? These are tricky to master because they’re weird, and they’re weird because they weren’t intended to be there. Which doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad, but it means you should really consider that they might be.
The mainstreaming of video games is rightly considered a factor, but blaming Call of Duty misses the mark on two points. The first is timing: I’m pretty certain the break came earlier, with Half Life 2 in 2004. Call of Duty dates back to the same period, but the relevant griping relates to its dominant presence in the console era, no earlier than 2007.
More important, though, is the thought that bringing more people to the table means dumbing down the product, which is demonstrably false. The gaming industry certainly had the incentive to bring in more people, since that meant more sales, but it also made the games more fun to more people who were interested, but pushed away by not only the skill floor, but also the culture of gatekeeping.
A close parallel is the fall of the classical adventure game, which was built around solving puzzles that were generally obstacles to doing simple things, like opening doors. (The most notorious involved the creation of a fake mustache from cat hair and syrup, in order to impersonate a person who didn’t even have a mustache, but there were many more cases where a necessary object occupied only a few pixels.) Games have unambiguously moved in the direction of streamlining this sort of thing. In the early days, you’d open the menu, select OPEN, select the door, and, if you were allowed, the door would open for you, probably. Nowadays you move up to it and press the same button you’d use to talk to someone or to pick something up. Depending on the game, the door might even just open automatically, because people got places to be. Likewise, when somebody picks up a first person shooter, they’re generally interested in first person shooting, rather than a game where you need to be told you should be hugging the wall to keep up.
And it’s not like there isn’t a market for the “skill based” game, as it were. The great success of Dark Souls demonstrates people are willing to take on games with major learning curves. But they don’t go to Dark Souls expecting to run and gun, and the difficulty of the game isn’t derived from unanticipated glitches.
I think it’s telling that the complaints have gotten dimmer over time. Either the older generation have adapted or left gaming, but one of the most important lines in that video comes right at the end, where he mentions the empty bunnyhopping servers: even they don’t think it’s interesting anymore.
But they’re not completely gone, just harder to find. And if one listens closely, you will always be able to hear the whispers in the wind: “The days of games requiring skill are gone, unfortunately.” “Nobody needs talent to do well in modern games.” “Call of Duty, Call of Duty? Call of Duty! Call of Duty.”