Games That Could Be An Esport - GunZ the Duel - A Written Review
Introduction
Originally this was a companion piece to a podcast episode that a couple of friends and I worked on right before the pandemic. The podcast has since blown up, but I wanted to keep this write-up.
The idea behind this concept is that I wanted to revisit a game that sparked my competitive drive, and with hindsight, see where the game fell short in and what could have changed to make the game into a popular esport.
Part One: What is GunZ?
GunZ the Duel is a free-to-play online third-person shooter developed by MAIET Entertainment in the early 2000s. GunZ has movement options that are HEAVILY inspired by 'The Matrix,' some bumpin' tunes, and some pretty laughable voice acting. Players create their character and build a loadout including up to two ranged weapons, one melee weapon, armor, two sub-items (Grenades, Flashbangs, Smoke Bombs, Health Kits, Armor Kits), and two rings. The game is a lobby-based system where the host can set up different game types such as Team Deathmatch, Duels, Assassination, etc…
One thing I failed to realize when I wrote this up years ago was that there is surprising overlap between the Melee player base and people that played Gunz. iBDW put out a few tweets about GunZ and every response was nostalgic about the early 2000s shooter, and I mean, it makes sense. Both GunZ and Melee have high mechanical barriers to entry and a deeper understanding of positioning, neutral game, and punish game…Or we like moving our hands really fast, who can say?
Part Two: What made this game so good?
As I mentioned earlier, this game's movement is heavily based on 'The Matrix' …and it. Is. AWESOME! After players joined a lobby, they were dropped into one of many pretty sizable maps and could run around pretty freely. You could run along or up walls, jump off them, do Max Payne-esq dives with your guns out, dash around with a sword. Everything in the game felt really satisfying to do and made you feel like you were cool AF. The game would be cool enough on its own. Sometime late into the Korean release of GunZ, there was a coding oversight that actually led to an evolution of gameplay that would push the physical capabilities of the player base and increase the speed of gameplay by 200%.
After this patch was released, people figured out that you could cancel specific animations with others and create new movement sequences. I'm going to break down two before moving forward because otherwise, I would be writing a master's thesis on advanced game mechanics for a sixteen-year-old free-to-play game.
Wall Cancel [Wall Jump > Slash or Stab > Dash (back to wall)]: Alright, so remember how I said you could run up or jump off walls? The downside to jumping off walls was that after you did it, you couldn't really do much else afterward. Sure, you could look around or shoot your guns, but outside of that, you were just kinda locked into a fixed animation and fall trajectory. Thanks to the previously mentioned coding error, players found out that you could now cancel this back/side flip animation with a sword slash(or dagger stab). Since the sword slash animation is so short, you would go back to a neutral position way quicker than you would if you just wall jumped, and since you're in a neutral position, you can just dash back towards the wall and repeat…and each time you did this you would gain a little more height. This was a HUGE discovery because it took the game, mostly fought on the ground, and brought it to the skies! This sequence meant you could stay in the air for an indefinite amount of time, provided you could still make it back to a wall.
Slash Shot [Jump > Dash > Slash (hold) > Switch to Gun > Shot]: So I mentioned that you can do these Max Payne dives with your gun out. While they look pretty badass, they are…less than optimal. You move at a fixed speed and direction, and since it was a long animation, it left you pretty vulnerable. So the only mobility option when using your guns was pretty bad, and walking around, in general, was really slow…like really slow… I'm surprised I'm only just now thinking about how slow the regular walk speed was…So...How the hell are you supposed to move around with your guns out in this game called GunZ? Welp! Thanks to the previously mentioned oversight of slash being able to cancel animations, you could dash around with your sword, perform this move, and have incredible mobility while still being able to shoot. This meant you could quickly engage to point-blank range with a shotgun, and disengage just as quick.
Those are just the tip of the iceberg on advanced mechanics; for a few more, you can listen to the podcast or read more information here.
I briefly touched on the loadout options way back at the beginning of this article, but to remind you guys real quick, they were pretty vast. Additionally, you also had to consider how much each item weighed, which lead to situations where you would have to ask yourself if the extra three grenades you could carry are worth running around without a piece of armor. Diving deeper into gameplay variety, we also have…STAGES! The game had a ton of different stages, each with different layouts and/or death pits. I can envision a competitive scene where two teams of 3-5 players match up in a best of three, strike down different stages for the first game, and then ban stages and change loadout in between matches, similar to how stage-striking and banning works in Super Smash Brothers.
Another exciting aspect was the Team Deathmatch mode. GunZ decided to go with an elimination approach to TDM, similar to Counter-Strike. If you died, you were out for the rest of the round until one side eliminated all their opponents. This created intense moments of hype where you would have to fight against the odds to get a win…Since the maps were rather large, it would lead to a lot of situations for ambushes and quick kills. Unlike CS, though, the game was faster-paced, so it would result in these "anime-ass-naruto" battles where someone would end up fighting off two or three people.
Quick recap
Diverse gameplay options (Game modes, weapon loadouts, and stages)
Stable, fun, and fair base mechanics
Deep technical skill requirement that rewards practice and consistent play
Bumpin' ass tunes
Part Three: “…Wat?” - DeAngelo
The title of this section might not make a lot of sense, without the context of the podcast, but it was such a comical moment in time that I feel like I have no choice but to keep it in. Since you’re likely lacking this context This is the section where I cover the messy side of GunZ.
The game was free to play, and MAIET and ijji ultimately needed to make money off this thing, so the game was loaded with "premium items." These are items that you had to pay real-life dollars to get some dope ass items. the problem lies in the fact that these items often tipped the scales in a HUGE way by providing a ton of extra health and armor to characters, additional damage in new melee weapons, ranged weapons, and enchantments, and the worst offender…premium health and armor kits, which essentially gave people a second health and armor bar. Ultimately, fighting against premium items wasn't that bad; you could still get better and overcome the obstacle…the real villainous aspect of premium items was that a vast majority of them were only rentals. Yep! You would have to keep dishing out money every couple of months if you wanted to play with your fancy toys in this digital game on the internet.
This next problem is a pretty big one. Despite the game being on a server and you joining lobbies with up to fifteen other people, the whole game was peer-to-peer. This is something that I continuously look back on and say to myself, "WHY DID I PUT MYSELF THROUGH THAT?!" Ultimately, this meant that depending on your internet connection and distance between other players would affect how you and your opponents would see each other. If I had 200 'ping' to someone, they would have to anticipate where I would be going in about two seconds and just shoot there instead of where I actually was. It was incredibly annoying and ultimately led people to create their own mods to downgrade world textures to improve their aiming or import a custom crosshair with latency layouts so you would know where to aim based on their ping. Just check out these sweet graphics!
So, the next topic… the game was a hacker's paradise. I'm sure you're probably saying something like - "Oh man, that's pretty awful! Why didn't they have any sort of anti-cheat software implemented into the game!"…Well, they did…It just didn't really work. The next thing you're probably asking is what was the limit of these hacks…Well…the hacker could do PRETTY MUCH WHATEVER THE HELL THEY WANTED! Invulnerability to damage and death? Yep! No-clip mode? You bet! Infinite ammo? You know it! My favorite, and by far the most used, was something called "The Lawnmower." This hack would reduce the recovery frames for attacking options down to zero, which meant you could unload a million shotgun rounds into someone with a single activation. Alternatively, you could combine it with no clip mode to hover up to the sky and rain down a WW3 equivalent of rockets down on the level or use it to surround your body with a massive stunning attack and race around the level just killing people by touching them. At many points in the game's lifespan, these hacks would be an actual DDoS attack. After ijji picked up the game, hacking attempts ended up becoming less frequent. Still, I'm not sure if that can be attributed to a better anti-cheat engine, or if hackers were just more hesitant to get accounts locked since some actually bought into the game. Who's to say?
Technical issues are one thing, but those can be worked on and fixed in time (not that they were…). If the gameplay and combat interactions are redeeming enough, and the development team works to improve the game, it can still be a good experience, but the problem is that the game more or less has become "solved" at a certain point. The optimal meta was to use: a female character model, a sword, two shotguns, a premium armor set, two rings for extra armor and health, and the highest tier of premium health and armor kits. Any deviation from this and you were automatically putting yourself at a disadvantage. Additionally, there were a few instant death combos due to the ability to cancel animations and high damage output of shotguns, which put a lot of pressure on players to play perfectly since any opening meant your whole life bar was deleted.
The final thing I want to touch on is the development of the game in general. When MAIET first introduced this code oversight that revolutionized the game, they tried to revert the code and undo it, which was met with a torrent of negative feedback from the community. The development team decided to listen to that feedback, which led to them having a game with some incredibly deep mechanics, but it always remained a mistake in their eyes. Since they were a smaller studio and the esports boom wasn't in full swing, it feels like they weren't focused on making a massive competitive smash hit, but just a fun way to pass the time, and I don't think they fully grasped what they had actually created.
Quick recap
Rental items that tilted game balance in favor of people that could dish out more money
Peer to peer connectivity and just poor net code
Lousy anti-cheat system
A meta that was quickly solved
Small indie studio with a lack of vision for the bigger picture
Part Four: What Could Have Changed?
Put a price tag on the game: So by putting a retail price on the game, MAIET could drop the aspect of in-app transactions and focus on balancing out the in-game items
Fix the net code and move off of peer to peer: I'm willing to cut a little slack on this since the game was released in the early 2000s, and this is likely the only option the studio had available to them, but this is probably the number one thing I would change. The game is so fast-paced that you need to trust that your shots are going where you're putting them.
Implement an actual anti-cheat system and actually punish hackers: As I mentioned earlier, the game had an "anti-cheat system," but it just outright didn't work. If the development team actually spent time working against hacking systems and banned users for continuous use of hacks, the game experience would have been much more enjoyable.
Embrace your mistakes: While they ultimately decided to keep these exploits in the game, they saw them as a mistake and wanted them to be gone. You can tell by some level designs that they started to embrace these aspects (I'm looking at you dungeon), but I felt like their heart wasn't entirely in it, which leads to…
Re-balance, re-balance, re-balance: To say MAIET or ijji did nothing after the game's release would just be a lie. They released several updates to include new game modes, levels, or premium items (pumpkin head is the best), but they ultimately didn't look into re-balancing things. Once they decided to keep the glitches in the game, they should have started monitoring the game and the community more to see how things were impacted. Oh, shotguns are powerful now since you can cancel these frames? Scale back some damage. Oh, rolling is not worth anyone's time? Make it a bit quicker, or let people jump out of it, or fucking anything! God…Rolling sucks
Timing: This is something that I don't think could be fixed, but it's important to acknowledge it as a shortcoming. GunZ came out in the early years of online gaming and right at the start of the esports boom. The release's timing led to some poor foresight into the game's development and the company's overall vision.
In Closing…
GunZ is one of the most important aspects of my life, and it shaped who I am as a competitor gamer. It taught me to look for obscure options, anticipate behaviors, start a training regimen, and improve finger dexterity. It's also a game that helped me forge some of my most meaningful friendships. I'm sad that this game didn't end up riding the esports wave, but I'm thankful for the good times and mindset it provided me with.
If you're interested in learning more about the history of the development of GunZ and GunZ 2 (Which basically flopped on release due to the same mistakes), I highly recommend checking out How glitches created an accidental success - Gunz the Duel.
If you're looking to play GunZ, there are a few private servers for the game around. My personal recommendation is for Freestyle GunZ. The community is relatively active, and they've taken a lot of steps to re-balance things that I've touched on.
Until next time…" Let's have a good time playing fairly."