foreign every now and then there comes an online multiplayer title that just defines or screams being from a particular age of gaming or even place a game so iconic and noticeable that even though it never had massive mainstream success it still creates discussion in intrigue today guns The Duel was Prime 2006 gaming backward nerds on the internet were still emerging from the deep and dark forums from whence they came new grounds mmorpg.com and more iconic websites of our youth all had references whether in montages gameplays or [ __ ] posts of guns The Duel it was a rite of passage for many of us guns The Duel came out of nowhere when it launched in the West in 2006 from developer mate entertainment out of South Korea introducing fast-paced movement in action we hadn't ever seen guns focused more on what was described as end fighting with guns think gunslinging but ramped up to the anime levels it was awesome no peaking Corners endlessly or camping you could double down Ash buffered Bunny Hop b-hop Dash wall run wall cancel animation cancel butterfly which was attacking and blocking at the same time slash shot and I'm not kidding that's not even it the sheer movement options and speed at which they could be executed in guns made for arguably one of the most fast-paced multiplayer Shooters we had ever seen But although guns had quite the legendary status and had existed for over 15 years at this point and they even made a sequel guns 2 which would prove to be an unfortunate massive failure by comparison the developer who created it faded into a sort of sad obscurity during that journey and the license behind guns itself has seemed to shelved and traded around a few times now guns is still playable today despite its multiple shutdowns in more ways than one but not to the same official capacity it once was in order to find out why that isn't the case we have to go back far enough to diagnose the largest contributing factors that led to either guns failing to catch massive popularity or why the title was unable to have a healthier official longevity not all deaths are abrupt sudden or a full of deep tragedy some titles just Fade Into Obscurity and those sorts of episodes like this one will focus more on the positive life cycle of a game and it's given Legacy so think of this as a special homage to guns and Guns players and less of a focus on what the game was bad at because I personally like and enjoyed the game flaws and all but my prefacing aside we still do have a mystery to solve as much as a story to tell Detectives made entertainment which stands for team backwards with the eye thrown in there for Innovation was formed way back in 1998 in Korea with quite the humble beginnings it was a team of researchers who banded together to create a video game development team which was a pretty cool origin story I might add mate would launch their first game a semi-successful online RTS title A Saga now I played a title much like this called artifact as a kid so I'm quite fond of this incredibly Niche genre where you can play RTS games online with other players simultaneously over different time periods and game lengths the title they would build themselves up to next however was Guns The Duel as it was dubbed which would first see its close beta back in 2003 in just Korea the official launch of guns The Duel in Korea was sometime in the summer of 2003. there's little information due to it being an Eastern lunch 20 years old at this point but the only time you see a title brought from Korea to the Western Market is if either it shares some level of success or they put a lot of money into it and they want the investment back with guns it looked like the latter but guns at this point was a mystery and that would all change in 2005. guns closed beta would hit the West 2005 hitting at just about the peak rise of the internet rage in age where memes were just funny images we posted when bored online well before they were really memes I mean when guns hit the Western World we had never seen anything like it before sure fast-paced Arena Shooters like quake and Halo had existed already but guns brought more of a focus on end fighting and gunslinging coupled with insane movement ability the uniqueness was apparent as soon as it was playable online it was that distinctive of a title this closed beta would prove successful as within the next year November 29th 2006 guns The Duel would be launched in both the EU and the us bringing to the West for the first time a fast-paced movement-based anime shooter guns was a third person peer-to-peer multiplayer shooter meaning that they didn't utilize dedicated servers so one player would serve as the server so to say the primary game modes ever played were Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch in the quest mode a PVE based Cooperative mode where you killed monsters and eventually a boss let's talk about the actual gameplay the flagship part of guns the part that everybody remembers love or hate guns is a third person shooter but it's like no other infighting is a focus on the fighting that happens within your immediate peripheral think of Close Quarters combat with guns and melee weapons the CQC aspect of guns combined with the for a Time completely unique melee weapon mechanics made for incredibly fast-paced up close in personal combat guns had standard armor with bonuses that improved your survivability showcasing gender-specific armor for Minnie for the first time these armor pieces included a head hand body hands legs and feet pieces headgear was obtained from questing or later on purchasing you could choose between seven different weapons pistols rifles revolvers shotguns SMGs MGS and rocket launchers and four melee weapon though the last one never launched in the na officially daggers swords dual swords and large swords you then had grenades rings and an enchant slot and a recovery slot you had up to 12 total equipment slots with a total weight requirement or limit and that made sense because the whole point of guns was being mobile switching between all of your weapons and equipment while maintaining your aim and tracking on your enemy was more challenging than in most Shooters because of the movement potential that players had the bass movement alone was already incredibly impressive you could wall run jump double jump change momentum directions Crouch and roll however by the time that guns came to the West it had already been out in Korea for some time already and a style of play had been developing from Korea that was Finding its way to the Western launch K style as it was dubbed was the ultimate way to play guns while early on guns was challenging in high skilled play Korean style brought in more APM and the ability to perform multiple inputs and quick successions through the use of Animation canceling it's not to say that Koreans invented animation canceling they didn't we were doing it in Halo 2 by the way but it's the state that they mastered it and adopted it to their own style regarding such some people felt conflicted about the case style because it was preemptively firing off mechanics versus reactively and it was at the end of the day an unintended mechanic being fully utilized one that required an insanely High APM to compete against other players with this would raise the barrier of entry for new players Gray deeply and changed the way that the game was played strategically to further explain what k-style consisted of besides just button mashing preemptively as in the actual techniques that you use there are a number of useful videos on YouTube that you can go watch for example this one by remix is for X Super Smash Brothers Melee players who are quite familiar with numerous button inputs and mechanics the basic movement options are all ramped up when you add animation canceling in and the combining of two inputs together this becomes the new basic movement if you will that means that the skill floor raises up tremendously on the more advanced end you have techniques like flash stepping double butterflies and it doesn't stop there the skill ceiling for guns really isn't about aiming it's about movement and reacting properly so as expected they push the limits even more with movement with things like triple Dash double flash stepping and so on and so forth the movement gets so crazy that when you watch montage videos it looks like an anime characters and they're killing players and that was the magic behind guns it was all about style points and feeling like a total badass it was like CS 1.6 on scare steroids for some people K style and the movement that came with it though elevated that while for others it became the moment that they knew that they couldn't compete anymore and some players would just move on to other games guns was popular but as a niche title there was simply nothing else like it on the market which made it incredibly unique and polarizing at the same time guns would have so much popularity that they would introduce their cash shop January 8 2007.
this was quite revolutionary for the time because many online games didn't even have a cash shop especially because the Western Market was very new to microtransactions the microtransactions and Lobby shooters were actually a thing from Asia originally that even in games like Battlefield Heroes a western game I covered on the series as well would feature as well the problem with such is no amount of semantics can change this either by the way is that it's pay to win literally the only way you can get access to high-end slots is through buying them they weren't just cosmetic and actually had values to them this meant that guns despite its incredibly High skill cap and floor was a Pay to Win online title which is just about probably one of the biggest twists in the story for many people this is arguably because it's not just a Korean title which is more familiar with such it's more that it wasn't designed to be so high skill originally the player base sort of manifested that on their own might entertainment effectively accidentally created a super competitive classic one that by many account they weren't monetizing very fairly which would end up hurting the perception of the game greatly the first and last major update that would hit guns The Duel would hit February 14 2007 dubbed the quest update this update would add hard modes to the already present Quest mode allowing players to get better rewards and an even better challenge May 2007 and this would be the last official update that would add new sounds and voices to the game as well at least I think Clan Wars comes before or after I'm not quite sure but it was added sometime post launch and it would greatly change the focus of most players and the game itself clan wars were usually four versus four and consisted of all the same normal Madness in a guns fight except with three other teammates against an enemy team not only were the stakes High well relatively for the time as the game was so young that Esports didn't even really exist yet winners would get bragging rights and on the internet back then that was King could I did a video on guns as an esport I recommend checking out because it accurately captures why people both loved and hated the competitive scene in that game in retrospect the reason guns The Duel would see such few major updates is that developer might entertainment was following the trend of the time period which MMOs and online multiplayer games were doing which is kind of getting Lightning Fast sequels in many cases these sequels were quick to fail for a number of reasons find out more about some of these examples like Asheron's Call and EverQuest and their respective death of a game videos guns to the second duel and no I'm not kidding about the name would begin development as early as October 2007. but guns choosing to transition a mere one year after launching in the West Was going to be taken quite negatively by that audience because although they didn't know for sure yet like we do with the beauty of hindsight the shifting of resources to the sequel would Doom guns from receiving any more future content sure guns would receive some updates but very little in the way of new maps or new PVE content especially when guns 2 was proving to be quite the undertaking it was utilizing a more powerful version of the original guns engine dubbed real space 3.0 now and was all together a brand new game according to might entertainment what was most shocking or alarming about guns too was that it wasn't necessarily looking to be a spiritual successor to guns or the exact style that guns patented compared to guns one we are developing guns to Inner Direction which combines out fighting with infighting properly according to devs guns 2 would be combining both in and out fighting unlike guns one this sounds like a cool idea in theory but the difficulty would be in execution if they did a bad job then you might just have another generic feeling shooter versus the unique identity that was Guns the guns team would also discuss their desire to break up the K style that dominated their game although this is a super old translation how I read it is that they wanted to provide some elements of the case style but not just the case style is the best way or only way to play the game while I can see why the fan base would not be happy with such changes I can all also see the developer's perspective because ultimately they never intended to create the game that guns became so it was kind of like them trying to recapture or retake ownership of what guns was and failing to do such worst of all throughout this time and dedication to create an all-new guns experience the game was originally set to launch in 2009 and would then be delayed to 2010 and then 2011. delays are a natural part of project management I should know I used to do it but the issue with guns 2 being delayed so heavily was my entertainment was trying to cash in on the success and momentum of guns with a sequel every year delayed was going to make that more difficult not to mention in the case of online games especially one to two years can make a world of difference think about the games that came out in just one to two years before World of Warcraft and how outdated they were made to look and feel guns one's popularity was still quite rampant at this time however as the game was a cult classic in many online circles but once guns 2 would launch the fate of Mayan entertainment and guns 1 would certainly become apparent the floodgates would be opened and guns would live forever in 2011 when the source code would become available for the 1.5 version of the game this was a super crucial move in the preservation of online games period but in the case of guns this would allow other players to run servers of their own considering that the game is peer-to-peer this was great news the source code being released however it ended up happening means that guns would continue to be played for the next decade or decades it was absolutely a huge moment for guns fans and today has still led to multiple more private servers in existence guns 2 would launch in Korea in 2011 as well the same year the source code for the original game would leak how long the game would take to be brought to the West Was a serious concern for guns fans especially when the game was already delayed by two years by the time the West got the sequel would they even care anymore plus how successful was Guns 2 in Korea anyway that success would also dictate if the game would ever be brought over or in what capacity guns one would shift from EG platform to area games March 2012. as far as I understand it
this was more akin to an acquisition not a shifting EG will report a lackluster profit and the hassle of dealing with constant hackers as the reason for the switch hackers had plagued guns since the beginning as being a peer-to-peer game made it quite easy to hack and modify hackers could ESP hack see you through walls aim lock or just do certain things faster or quicker than you should actually be able to do to make matters worse because guns was a peer-to-peer game this made the game incredibly ping Reliant anything higher than 30 ping for most players and you weren't really competitive peer-to-peer games suffer from this often which makes the hitboxes of your opponents lag to an extent which you have to account for when playing the game this combined with a sometimes toxic elitist player mentality kept new players from joining in and greatly burnt out many current players I was sent multiple emails concerning the guns community and how toxic it could be I heard stories that uh yeah I'm probably not gonna recount but there are a bunch of bad stories about corruption and private servers being ran by well not so Savory people this is common in games that are kind of left to their own device that have high skill caps and have a bunch of hackers Darkfall game that I cut my teeth on much like guns suffered from this exact problem area games a free-to-play online RPG publisher based out of Germany would now be in charge of guns one and guns would be playable on areas platform with characters reportedly remaining from the EG server area games running guns however was warring for me even at the time and still of course in hindsight I've never seen area motivated by anything other than porting Korean games and making money from them long past their time in the sun according to previous players before the switch guns was in the decline but still managing a 4 000 plus player count following the switch as in the same day even all only a few hundred players would be seen online Mayan entertainment was a big player in the world of online RPG development now with two guns titles now under their belt they would create a new title a hardcore PVE based title dubbed Raider Z or Raiders that would be maligned throughout its entire career and never properly launched or supported for various reasons Raiders would launch November 2012 with basically no advertisement through perfect world entertainment as the publisher I got to play and see Raiders at PAX East and it wasn't a half bad game it however had rather poor explanations for what kind of game it was and it had an overall rather low presence now Raiders is deserving of its own video so we're not going to get into too much detail about it here but made entertainment had built a brand new MMO after launching a sequel to guns the same year they offloaded the game to somebody else seemed like they were ready to move on from guns to bigger and better more ambitious titles but with how fast they seem to transition off of their successful title to start how many fans of guns were left supporting my entertainment in the first place and how many had moved on playing Guns on their own on private servers it must be frustrating for a developer trying to make a bigger and more ambitious game to feel like people still want to play your first game but that's how game development works sometimes and you're better served satisfying an existing Demand versus creating an all-new one in my opinion foreign the original guns would be shut down officially May 31st 2013 the numbers would continue to decrease since pre-area games levels an area had seen enough they decided to discontinue the game but luckily there were numerous resources and websites that were already in existence at the time to where you could go read more about guns how to run the server and how to join in and play on one too freestylers world as a resource has his guns duels where you can find out how to play guns even in 2023 there's also a plethora of YouTube videos to go check out so while the game would be officially shut down at this time before it had even shut down there were already servers up and running guns wasn't going anywhere yet the sequel to guns would launch in mere months after the shutdown of the original in the west this would make it three years since the game had launched in Korea by the time guns 2 hit the West nobody was looking for it anymore whatever fans were left was just playing classic guns or moved on to other titles and when guns 2 came out in the west thanks to the internet it was already quite well known to fans that it wasn't a gun's title for the rabbit original fans instead guns 2 was an attempt to shy away from their iconic infighting and movement-based gameplay and transition to more of what most fans would describe as a clunky generic third-person shooter with not much to show for it guns 2 would not only fail in Korea it would fail in the west by the summer of 2015. guns 2 would achieve an impressive 10 000 player Peak count on Steam before in just under a few months dropping to just down to a thousand players or so resulting in a shift towards maintenance mode guns 2 certainly greatly affected guns the duel and its Legacy going forward guns to the sequel would likely be a forgotten final meanwhile guns one remains to be played today and that we have a lesson of entering too far outside of your own audience in the end satisfying none guns too wouldn't even have a preservation effort it would just be forgotten guns 2 would fail to revive the guns franchise but news would hit the web March 2016 that the original guns would be reportedly revived in Korea the song soft would express interest in bringing the iconic classic anime shooter back the song soft who originally merged with Maya entertainment following guns one's launch would buy the rights to guns one and two in June of 2016. with the plans of bringing the title back they would also purchase Raiders with the same idea unfortunately though a remarkable five years would pass and no update from a song soft would be published there was an initial movement with guns in Korea like some basic updates being conducted but now the websites were writing articles about what happened on the song soft leaving their whereabouts their future plan for the guns franchise unknown masongsoft does own the rights so if they or anyone wants to do anything in an official capacity with guns they would have to square that away with them the last update was concerning Raiders and that was a resurrection but alas no details further this update was as recent as December 2022 the guns Revival project seemed to be all but put on the Shelf at this point I even heard from one of my contacts that they reached out to the song soft and found out that they weren't indeed doing anything and in response the song soft enacted a bunch of dmca takedowns of guns content on YouTube truly a bizarre happens now before I get to my final deduction I want to reiterate that this video was a special one and although there's certainly failures of my entertainment including from themselves in their first serious title guns that led to the game not getting broader appeal and being shut down sooner there is still so much positive about the game that must be stated I'll go ahead and say it I'd put guns The Duel up there with Jedi Academy as one of the best power fantasy shooter action games you can play where you truly feel super powerful as your skill increases in the game the sheer amount of movement options combined with the need to constantly track your target using their movement options contributed to a fast-paced shooter really like no other I think it's important to talk about the legacy of a title like guns because although it's still played today and fondly remembered by some I think there is still so much to learn from it for future titles not to mention for some people they didn't watch this video all they remembered guns for was being paid to win and hackers interesting thing about guns for me was that super specific movement based Tech seemed to actually be highly desired in the game even when it wasn't there originally which contradicts many popular perspectives in fact the second game failed due to a lack of such finally much like games like Super Smash Bros melee and Halo 2 glitches and bugs in the case of guns actually contributed to the game and its skill ceiling increasing devs keeping those bugs and glitches in would cement those particular games I referenced much like guns as being one-of-a-kind competitive experiences where glitches suddenly became the actual game while there might be an argument to remove such things as they were not intended features doing such would remove what made those particular games unique it'd be like removing bxring or double shotting from Halo 2 a removing animation canceling from guns or removing wave dashing or L canceling from Super Smash Brothers Melee guns The Duel is still playable today so you have the chance to go experience what I'm discussing here as words don't really do it justice just a fair warning though some of the players can be dicks to new players so try to find a community of players to join up with and if not watch a few frag videos and just be amazed that music means that this mystery has come to an end and unlike most cases guns The Duel has been long gone and this was more of a trip down memory lane for many of us nostalgic Gamers our case study for those who missed out on it the first time we've gathered enough Clues and progressed the timeline detectives which means that it's time for the final deduction developer had shifted their focus multiple times rampant hacking the original developer perished a failed sequel hastened the original's downfall the area games acquisition a niche title age waits for nobody guns will remain in the history books as one of the most unique online Shooters to come from Korea or really anywhere and one of my favorite games to see make the rounds as it really is as I've been saying over and over again if you didn't start the drinking game you're late one of a kind unlike some retrospective episodes however which are not really about failures we were able to determine that my entertainment did make some mistakes in their handling of guns which makes you think even with all of that guns still was able to have the reputation and Legacy that it had what would have been the True full potential of the game we won't know but what we do know is how guns ended up and can still luckily go enjoy that experience right now to an extent thanks for watching
2023-03-17