I never liked the concept of these games, even when it was Battle Royale before that.

The idea of having one life and if you mess up you have to wait for the game to finish or if you have teammates to revive you never appealed to me.

I grew up on classic shooters like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 99, Counter-Strike 1 and having Bomb Defusal and TDM is a staple to me, a shooter without those is like a joke to me that I fail to understand.

Later on I played some Korean online shooters that introduced me to new game modes like Point Control, Escort/Payload that I only enjoyed and broadened my view of what can be a different fun way to experience a shooter, but since around 2018 when all shooters fell for the Battle Royale/Extraction fad I couldn’t play anything new, because it wasn’t what I wanted and I felt like I wasn’t even the target audience.

Even Korean shooters started doing this too and no more classic shooters were being released and the old online games I liked were either shut down or so bad it wasn’t worth playing them anymore.

I guess they are getting PvE mode because a lot of other players feel the same way as I do and people don’t want to die for one little mistake and then have to wait or try to find a new match.

What I wish to see is a resurgence of the classic shooters, even better if the developers focus on older graphics so the games aren’t too demanding and take 50-100GB of disk space. I remember playing such shooters that were no bigger than 3GB and I had thousands of hours of fun in them. Now these new 50-100 and more GB games take me longer to download, install and update than I actually end up playing them.

Such a shame. It may be a bit pessimistic, but I think mainstream gaming has gone down the drain and the only haven for gaming is indie gaming.

PvP extraction shooters are generally awful because the nature of the genre is an extraction point which ALWAYS gathers campers who ruin the fun. PvE is the natural fix for the problem and helps the game feel more forgiving for new players.

I was there 3000 years ago when the first Arc Raiders teaser dropped and brought us promise of a new PvE game from ex-Dice talent, perhaps channeling a new yet retro take on a Defiance-like experience, only to have my hopes crushed with the extraction rug pull. Oh how the turn tables.

Nikita Buyanov recently posted Tarkov’s stats on twitter and PvE accounts for 60% of the playerbase. He’s notoriously a PvE hater, but who better than him would understand that it’s not that you’re taking away from PvP, it’s just a way to gain players and retain players that are tired of the PvP shenanigans.

PvE is almost always a net positive, if handled correctly.

Without new content, it will lead to boredom either way. I’d like to think more ways to play adds longevity but people usually lean heavily towards one or the other. Idk how many people are going to pick this up after this long. Lmk in six months if I’m wrong though.