alt Hacker NewsOne thing I missed from Unreal Tournament, which too few other games adopted IMHO, was the concept of mutators. Effectively server-level mods which, as the name implied, mutated the gameplay in some way.
There were silly ones like the one making your characters head larger for each kill, and those which made it just different like low gravity, and so on.
It was also relatively easy to make your own, thanks to UnrealScript.
Really wish more multiplayer games embraced this concept, it really increased replayability by changing things up.
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Counter-Strike 1.6 (and other Goldsrc based games) greatly benefited from AMX Mod X's scripting capabilities. I miss the days where people were playing modded servers.
Obscuring server browser and/or not allowing self-hosting dedicated servers killed modding in modern games. A real shame.
Few games today can put me in the heightened frenzy of an Unreal Tournament instagib match. Pure, unadulterated adrenaline.
For a few years Sauerbraten scratched that itch.
I remember the one where you got physically bigger every time you killed someone, until you couldn't fit through doorways etc. And smaller and smaller every time you died. It was pretty hilarious.
The entire extensibility story in Unreal series has been amazing from the get go. Where QuakeC was really more of a scripting language "on the side", with UT it felt more like the entire game is written in UnrealScript, with some native bits here and there for performance. The language was interesting too, incorporating things such as first-class support for various states (you could define different implementations for a function depending on which state the object is, and derived classes could extend that).
No wonder the mutator scene in UT was crazy. My favorite mod for the original UT99 was Dr Strangelove, which modded the Redeemer gun (the one that shoots huge nuclear missiles) to allow you to ride them.
Same. My favorite mutator was the exploding ammo cases. So much fun to see an enemy run to pick up an ammo box and just shoot it with a pistol blowing it up in his face. That was apretty revolutionary game mechanic 20 years ago. Do any modern games have such a thing?
This reminds me of Quake with the DeFrag mode "sub-game", but also gameplay available in Quake Live in which you could have a Railgun only match, but they could also behave like Rocket Launchers for rocket jumps.
Also allowing players to change the configuration of their game through the dev console was cool. My favorite visual change was to configure the railgun trails to persist for multiple seconds.
Instagib with ASMD shock rifles.
Those are in TF2 and Minecraft, perhaps one reason they’re still popular
My favorite was the one that spawned monsters, so you could have enemies that would attack either side during vehicle CTF or Onslaught game modes
Warcraft 3 had some of the greatest mods that kept the player base alive for decades
UnrealScript was the bomb, it was what got me started coding. Specifically replicating the gravity gun from Half Life 2.
Luckily it seems modern games (e.g. TF2, Overwatch) make this even more accessible with so called "workshops".
My favorite game of all time was Quake, similarly extended with QuakeC, into the QuakeWorld CTF game. I still dream about those maps.
There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.
Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).
Mutators are about the only thing keeping Starcraft 2 Co-Op players going in 2025 (and by extension, the community).
Earliest memory I have in the multiplayer FPS context was probably the 'cheat' menu unlocks for Goldeneye on the N64 in 1997.
Red Eclipse has mutators: https://github.com/redeclipse/base
These were my favorite part of Starsiege: Tribes. There was a modpack called Ultra Renegades that totally changed the gameplay and made it so twitchy and fun.
those ant-sized man in house maps were the best. i dont think ive ever seen anything like it since.
Mutators were amazing at the peak of unreal tournament, but towards the end of life they made it die that much quicker. I remember feeling a little nostalgic and wanting to play unreal tournament, but the only service I could find had a huge amount of mutators and mods installed where it was very much unlike the normal gameplay experience that I was looking for
Can't happen anymore because every multiplayer game is chasing esports.
I have always hated esports conceptually, from jump.
While most seemed to prefer Counter-strike, my childhood gaming was dominated by an Unreal Tournament mod called Tac Ops. While the games looked similar, the mechanics felt very different than Counter-strike. It was a much faster-paced game.
There were a ton of servers with wacky mods. I spent a ton of time on the low-grav servers. There were also some that made the top-scoring player huge. Those odd game modes were a blast.
EDIT: Also looks like people are still playing!
https://www.gog.com/dreamlist/game/tactical-ops-assault-on-t...
https://tactical-ops.eu/