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Both Cube and Sauerbraten have always been popular and successful as multiplayer games, so the first question you ask may be: why even care about singleplayer? Who would play it?
When discovering Cube I thought the singleplayer was decent, but it lacked polish and I was a bit disappointed there isn't more focus on it, the game seemed to have a lot of potential. Played it for a few hours and then forgot about it. The same happened when new maps and campaigns were added during the development of Sauerbraten - even through new features and overall more modern engine, the gameplay seemed more and more dated and boring, so I just stopped playing it and forgot about it again.
But then I played Brutal Doom and its even better mod, Project Brutality. Honestly, I liked the game more than any action game I've played in the last year, including AAA games. I don't know how to describe the awesomeness without using a lot of swearwords, so let's just say it has no bloody right to be this much fun when it's "only" a doom sourceport mod. It is amazing.
And it made me think. Why is it that nothing else like Doom exists? A simple straightforward shooter with gameplay so great it can be adapted a bit and enjoyed thoroughly almost a quarter century later, with relatively simple mapping tools, open-source, moddable, can be run on almost anything nowadays, with a big community emerging thangs to all this... At first Sauerbraten looks like an obvious candidate, right? But it's not. At all.
But why? Before playing Project Brutality I was never really sure why it has such a weird, dated feeling, but in the last few days, while shooting cacodemons in the face, I tried to isolate some things that seemed important to me. Please keep in mind that I'm looking at them purely from a singleplayer game point of view, most of them make perfect sense in a competitive arena shooter. I also don't really offer any solutions (yet), right now I'm more interested in your opinions and generally finding out if anybody else cares:
1. Gunplay: the guns feel light and weak. That's a very vague description, the causes imo may be: general low quality of some game models, weak sounds, boring animations, no effects like muzzle flash - the grenade launcher is perhaps the worst offender, it just seems like it lightly spits out a cute glowing ball about 3x the size of the muzzle, compare it to how heavy and powerful the grenade launcher and grenades even in Quake 1 feels. The bullet traces and their impacts look kinda weak and non-threatening (this is a bit hard to describe). All this is made even more prominent by the next point:
2. The shooting has very little feedback. This is a thing that Doom did excellently - the shotgun felt heavy because you could see blood particles, the creature was moved back and paralyzed for a short while and you were also pushed back a bit. Sauerbraten technically does some of these things, but I think they aren't really fine-tuned for maximum effect and don't work very well because of point 1 and because the monster models and animations look really bad.
The content quality is a really big point in this, because the Doom monsters look really good even now, and the animations, although simple, are well-made - especially the stumbling and dying. Apart from the monster animations being bad, the only hit effect is a floating number saying how much hitpoints you took, which is arguably worse than nothing because it shows how simple the game system is - no hit zones, nothing like a damage fall off, some subtle randomness... A feature that is good in a multiplayer arena shooter, but not in a single-player game. I also really enjoy various forms of gore in singleplayer shooters and believe that some variation on it (like shooting mechanical pieces off robots) is pretty damn important for shooting feedback. There is literal blood dripping from the ceiling when you use a grenade on a room full of monsters in Brutal Doom.
3. The monsters' attacks and movement patterns are really boring, the AI is too dumb. Pathfinding seems worse than in Doom, all the monsters seem to behave in exactly the same way, there is no uniqueness apart from using different weapons and having different HP. In Project Brutality imps usually shoot fireballs, but they will also attack you with bare claws when you get close, jump towards and around you and can climb on ceilings (nothing complicated, they just jump directly up and climb inside the edges of the flat surface). Cacodemons can try to dodge your shots. Pain elementals spawn tortured souls and explode on death. The monsters have more than 1 attack and their attack patterns and sometimes movement patterns are different.
4. Level design. This one is hard for me to pinpoint, because the level design of most Sauer maps is not bad and the maps in Doom were pretty simple and didn't use many interactive features: afaik only doors, keycards, switches, teleports and moving platforms/ceilings (all of it with visible and invisible triggers). I don't know if Sauerbraten engine even supports moving level geometry, but I bet most of it could be done with mapmodels. I suspect that some of the maps are actually good and only feel bad because of previous points, I also think that the movement is perhaps slightly too fast for singleplayer and slowing it down a little bit while perhaps adding a bit of headbob and weapon sway would help - flying through the map at supersonic speeds doesn't really allow you to focus on anything and makes any small spaces feel really weird and unrealistic, which is a problem because such spaces are often good from gameplay perspective - again, Doom is a perfect example.
The problems with actual level-design are harder to describe. It seems to me that most people don't really try to create an existing space, which is a bit of a problem, but many Doom maps are almost entirely abstract as well and they were fun nonetheless. The fact is that for multiplayer you can actually create completely abstract maps that just use vaguely thematical textures and as long as the gameplay is good and it looks good, you're set. But for singleplayer the map needs to build the setting more, show some progression and try to tell some story with the environment - and even Doom does that. Sauer maps mostly do not and mostly don't even do a specific theme very well - probably because they're done by multiplayer mappers. The interactive elements are also usually very simple, perhaps CubeScript is too complicated for mappers-nonprogrammers?
5. General lack of polish which also shows that singleplayer is just a side-thought.
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There are probably many more things causing the singleplayer to be like this and I'm interested to hear your thoughts. It seems to me that most of these aren't caused by technical limitations of the engine, but by lack of focus on singleplayer (many of those things are valid design choices for multiplayer) or by low content quality. This is a big problem - creating high quality animated models is a huge task and nearly impossible to have done for free. I always found it interesting that there are so many riddiculously good open-source software projects (in general, not just games) and so few high quality free assets, graphic designers don't seem to have hobby projects like programmers do. The comparisons with Brutal Doom in this regard can probably be boiled down to "animated 3D models are much much harder and more time-consuming than animated 2D sprites".
However, don't get me wrong, I don't think that realistic models and effects on par with modern AAA games are necessary at all - stylized low-poly models would actually be fine as long as they fit together thematically a bit, the animations were good, there was some damage model and gore and bit of nice looking ragdool physics (dead body flying across the room when you kill someone with a shotgun in Brutal Doom is amazing, stuff like that). Good animations still seem like a huge problem though.
The reason why I care at all is that I see huge potential in this - I really believe that we are missing a high quality doomlike shooter that is open, easy to make maps for, moddable and based on an excellent modern engine. Big developers don't really care about creating a long-term community and lately often don't allow mods at all (Doom 4 snapmap really isn't good enough) and small/indie developers don't really do good singleplayer shooters of this type too much or lack the technical skills to create something as advanced as the Sauerbraten engine. In an ideal world (not thinking about license issues etc) the best way would perhaps be to create it as a fork with a different name and sell it for a low price on Steam, using steam multiplayer API and community workshop - that would stop potential players from thinking "oh, it's just a 10 years old free shooter" and help establish the community (thanks to steam tools/features and because costing money creates a sense of value, making people more likely to learn about the game and engine instead of abandoning it after an hour).
I don't believe anything like this will happen with Sauerbraten, probably ever, but for the past few days I couldn't help but wonder about it because in some ways it seems like the ideal game.
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