online competitive games that are watchable by an outsider

[yakfak]

i've been trying to find something watchable on twitch in this vein. most esports games are weird and visually clumpy especially when modelled after DOTA or Starcraft, and the coverage tends to require you to have similar eye speed to the competitors and, in League of Legends's case, a fairly encyclopaedic knowledge of all the ten million characters and inventory items they can accrue, so you have to hope for good commentators.

 

hearthstone has all this empty screen space so you can concentrate on the important bit - squinting at undersized cards. MTG Arena is a bit guilty of that too and speaking as someone who knows how to play Magic I still don't think the presentation is any good.

 

i find the team-based FPS things dull and I guess spectating through the player's eyes is less exciting to an outsider viewer than a player. doom 2 or quake 3 deathmatch can be an ok diversion for a while? just not at all what I want from FPSes though.

 

what does rule in this esports format is big-character fighting games from series like Street Fighter, Tekken, Guilty Gear et al. DBFZ and MVC is less watchable cos of all the assists and some of the most anime anime fighters can be painful cos of the sheer verbosity and combo lengths. SF5 works really well cos the game explains itself, and the UK scene has some good commentators that travel to the big events. I am terrible at all fighting games from SF2 onwards but I know enough about the characters' general styles that commentary and gameplay can really fill in the blanks, plus just occasionally you get some really exciting matches :3

 

are there other games out there as watchable as the fighting games? thanks

[geo]

I always found TF2 enjoyable to watch competitively it's just a fun game. Fun to see, fun to watch and there are different cameras for the action rather than first or third person. People tell me it's not as watchable as something with an overhead map that you can clearly see who's winning and who's losing. I think the overhead map thing helps games like DOTA2 and LoL. Even one on one fighters are watchable, because you know who's winning and losing by the health bars.

 

I'd rather just play the game than watch people play it. There was a competitive video game show / documentary on the SyFy network like 15 years ago where the biggest criticism was "it's like watching your friend playing a game and you'll never get handed the controller."

[Cruduxy Pegg]

Just watch some random streamers and try to find ones you enjoy watching. I can watch Grubby goof around in warcraft 3 for hours but most other streamers make me quit the stream in less than 5 minutes. Same with almost every other game. Some games have outright no presence on twitch but a lot of players on youtube, might be worth considering as an alternative.

 

Am sure you can hover over cards in HS within the stream to read the description since most streamers use a plug-in for that. You don't have to squint or anything.. Although it still isn't that fun to watch.

[Kira]

I definitely enjoy watching Doom and Quake duels in particular. I find some of the highest level 1vs1 have a contagious tension to them. e.g. Rapha vs Evil in Quakecon 2016 or these long oldschool duels on map01 where they try to break the opponent psychologically.

Edited April 15, 2019 by Kira

[Komenja]

If you can manage to find anyone doing XCOM multiplayer matches, those are usually pretty cool or funny. There isn't really a scene for it though since XCOM EU/EW's multiplayer had a ton of bugs and XCOM 2's multiplayer had some massive lag/connection problems.

[Dragonfly]

Seconding Quake Live Duel Tournaments. Got both of my housemates into it, after watching about 40 mins they understood everything they needed to know:

- killing is good
- items respawn after a certain time. controlling items means easier victories
- these people have the aim of gods and are essentially no-scope sniping (railgun) people across the map with ridiculous consistency

 

They said that the fast paced nature of the movement is a little hard to get used to but it makes it all the more thrilling to watch.

 

The only complaint they had is one I share - the people in charge of the stream often miss out the first few seconds on some videos, and it's infuriating.

 

 

[baja blast rd.]

Age of Empires 2 for sure.

 

 

 

 

[Chezza]

I don't think this counts as it's not a tournament balanced game. But Dead by Daylight is fun to watch if you spectate the survivors.

[Dragonfly]

4 hours ago, rdwpa said:

Age of Empires 2 for sure.

 

Yo, that was a blast to watch, gonna have to check out more AoEII videos at some point. :D

[GuyMcBrofist]

There's a youtube channel that casts Supreme Commander games. SupCom has rules and a tech tree that are both pretty simple, and the games progress at kind of a slow pace so you have time to see what's happening.

 

 

[ReaperAA]

+ 1 for Quake 3/ Quake Live. Its a game that looks so simple and easy to understand and YET it is extremely complex at the same time.

 

In this video, Rapha(the best QL pro-player) explains what was going in his head when he fought Cooller (also a top level QL pro-player) in the deciding round of the ESL tournament finals match

 

[Fonze]

ALttPR tourneys are amazing to watch, especially if you like Zelda to begin with :)

 

This is the grand finals match from the 2018 fall tourney:

 

[loveless]

@ReaperAA Nice to see another cultured individual who appreciates duel as well.

[Grimosaur]

 

Doesn't get more intense than this

[unerxai]

16 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

+ 1 for Quake 3/ Quake Live. Its a game that looks so simple and easy to understand and YET it is extremely complex at the same time.

 

In this video, Rapha(the best QL pro-player) explains what was going in his head when he fought Cooller (also a top level QL pro-player) in the deciding round of the ESL tournament finals match

 

I like how they use rapha's config with the shitty graphics even though they're showing a demo to the audience and it makes no sense for an spectator to be seeing the shitty graphics, since low settings is something that only benefits the person playing. They used to do that for the streams back in the day too.

[CyberDreams]

7 hours ago, UNERXAi said:

 

I like how they use rapha's config with the shitty graphics even though they're showing a demo to the audience and it makes no sense for an spectator to be seeing the shitty graphics, since low settings is something that only benefits the person playing. They used to do that for the streams back in the day too.

 

Yeah, when i was reading up on Q3 commands as well as looking at forums for settings i noticed that most pro's play with super low graphics (such as changing your r_picmip setting). It's not like that game is hard to run nowadays or the engine is known to be horrific or anything. Possibly back in the day when everyone was trying to get a certain advantage and/or your PC really couldn't handle the game, but nowadays? I don't know. It just doesn't sit well with me. 

 

Anyway's, do people still play Quake multiplayer games in this way, such as Quake Champions or Quake Live (with low graphical settings i mean)?

[ReaperAA]

46 minutes ago, CyberDreams said:

 

Yeah, when i was reading up on Q3 commands as well as looking at forums for settings i noticed that most pro's play with super low graphics (such as changing your r_picmip setting). It's not like that game is hard to run nowadays or the engine is known to be horrific or anything. Possibly back in the day when everyone was trying to get a certain advantage and/or your PC really couldn't handle the game, but nowadays? I don't know. It just doesn't sit well with me. 

 

Anyway's, do people still play Quake multiplayer games in this way, such as Quake Champions or Quake Live (with low graphical settings i mean)?

 

The main reason for low graphics is not to get more frames (although higher frame rate means less input lag) but to improve visibility and reduce environment clutter. Lets not forget that for the pro players, playing matches is not just entertainment but its their JOB. They will try to obtain every advantage they can get against their opponents so its not surprising that Rapha's config looks like that.

[Kira]

Champions kind of prevents this by looking like a garbled mess in low details (it seems it's the PBR pipeline that's the cause). At least rapha on stream plays it with "normal" settings. Some games look better with low details. Reflex was built around this aesthetic too: 

 

[Cruduxy Pegg]

They still use super low settings configs to this day. Most recent would be in Apex Legends on potato settings, making it look like a ps2 game.

[Grain of Salt]

Not online, but I really enjoyed this gdq Super Mario World race, despite not knowing that much about smw racing.