I think a better alternative to loadouts for Quake, Doom, and Halo would be to allow players to choose from a few different sidearms to to spawn with. For Halo, it could be a choose between magnum, plasma pistol, SMG, or boltshot. For the id games, you could pick a blaster, single barrel shotgun, or enforcer-type…

Now we’re talking about two different things here:

You are assuming everyone playing an FPS wants to compete with Cooller and Fatal1ty, when in reality even in the 2k4 and Q3A communities in their prime, the cast majority of players were fine playing against random people on public servers.

I’m so exceedingly tired of this “it’s a good game, but it isn’t a good X game” argument. Are you having fun? Yes? Then get over it. This just in: the 90s? They ended 16 years ago. The gaming landscape has changed since then, and game design has drastically changed since then.

And no one felt that way about The New Order until after it came out... not to mention DOOM is shipping with three modes (sp,mp, and mapeditor).