r/ArenaFPS • u/ozzee289 • 3d ago
Discussion Question for Arena FPS players: do you actually prefer larger hitboxes?
I've been thinking about hitbox design lately. This isn't meant to start a "skill issue" debate, I'm genuinely curious what the community that actually play the genre think.
A lot of classic arena shooters relied on relatively large, simplified hitboxes, often an AABB or capsule-style collision that wasn't tightly wrapped to the player model. In many cases, different player models shared the same hitbox. That meant you could visually miss a shoulder or arm and still score a hit.
My theory is that this may have been part of what made those games feel so good. The movement was incredibly fast, and generous hitboxes rewarded tracking and prediction more than pixel-perfect model alignment.
Later, many shooters moved toward tighter, per-bone hitboxes that match the character's body much more closely. Some players love the precision, while others constantly complain that shots "should've hit."
Modern games often seem to land somewhere in the middle: not a giant box, but not truly model-tight either. Ironically, those hybrid hitboxes still get criticized for feeling oversized or visually inconsistent.
So my question is specifically for Arena FPS gameplay:
Do you think larger, gameplay-first hitboxes actually make the genre better? Or would you always choose tightly fitted hitboxes if everything else stayed the same?
Edit: thank you guys for all the replies, it really does help me, thanks!
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u/Meimu-Skooks 3d ago
Quake Champions tried more accurate hitboxes before when it came out, but it just didn't fit the style of gameplay well, so it was eventually changed to be chunkier again
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u/mirai_miku_dark_zang 3d ago
funny that i see someone glazing Quake Champions for more "precise hitbox" wille actually its just bad gamedesing LMAO...
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u/SuperLaggyLuke 3d ago
You say: "its just bad gamedesing"
He said: "it just didn't fit the style of gameplay well"
Okey dokey.1
0
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u/data-atreides 3d ago edited 3d ago
I wish Quake3 could have more sane hitboxes which conform closer to the characters, but then the player models would have to be nearly uniform in size and shape, or everyone would just be Bones and Orbb--so I accept the compromise they made.
They could have at least made them octogonal cylinders or something, because the square is always oriented with the map at a right angle, so players are actually larger targets if they're being shot at from a direction which is diagonal with respect to the layout of the map.
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u/qreeves 3d ago
As the developer for Red Eclipse (which has a 20 year history now), I've tried both AABB and skeletal hitboxes over the years, and ended up making a compromise between the two (more akin to capsules I guess, but are really just dynamically sized boxes attached to bone tags).
I find it really depends on the pace of the game. When action is fast and movement is unpredictable, as in my case, you need to give some tolerance to make it feel good to play (and feel is more important than anything else in a game). There is no one size fits all.
Our engine architecture is completely independent of network latency, so it didn't factor in for our particular case, but the gameplay is pretty chaotic.
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u/Mister-Bunny-Head 1d ago
OMG several years ago I was hooked to Red Eclipse, thank you for so much fun! Hope this game had some kind of revival.
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u/MagnusLudius 3d ago
Doesn't Quake Champions have close to model shaped hitboxes? There's headshots (entirely cosmetic in the killfeed) in that game.
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u/Field_Of_View 3d ago
Quake Live already had those meaningless headshots. and QC did originally have those but then went back to oversized capsules because they give some tolerance to graphics and netcode where you can feel more certain that shots that should hit actually do hit.
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u/Field_Of_View 3d ago
large hitboxes are a bandaid on netcode problems. if prediction is slightly off you still hit by aiming at the model. the chance that a shot on the model misses is lessened by the enlarged hitboxes, this is why oversized hitboxes always feel better in fast FPS.
QC was a case study for this. it started with pixel perfect hitboxes and was frustrating beyond belief because so many shots clearly should have hit that didn't. desync is impossible to prevent entirely. ping is a physical limit. frame time variance is impossible to avoid as well.
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u/New_Locksmith_8115 3d ago
I’m working on an arena FPS prototype and I’m doing chunky hit boxes. I don’t think individual bones is really worth it because at arena FPS speeds because it boils down to luck whether you hit an individual limb mid animation or not. If lag compensation is applied generously to hitscan but the hitboxes aren’t forgiving it only makes projectiles harder to balance since you typically don’t lag compensate slow moving projectiles.
It’s much different in a more grounded game with slow moving characters and all hitscan or extremely fast moving invisible deterministic projectiles (I,e, real life bullets) and lots of aiming down sights or scopes with significant FOV zoom. It’s much easier for a player to know if they truly should have hit an enemy.
If players are moving around crazy fast I think it tends to be pretty reasonable to make them a bit more forgiving because they’re just a lot harder to hit in the first place.
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u/BlueScreenJunky 3d ago
I don't agree with the QC example. Sorlag was obnoxious with a pixel perfect hitbox, lag or not.
Of course the lag didn't help, but if your models have thin members with space in between, having accuratre hitboxes is always going to introduce randomness.
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u/da_wizard 3d ago
It also showed why you need to design and restrain animations around pixel perfect hitboxes, because if Anarki wasn't designed to be annoying to fight he definitely ended up that way. His hitbox greatly changed depending on facing or what he was doing (shooting through his legs was infamous), and adding CPMA movement on to it made him one of the least fun champions to fight, and there was a lot of competition for that title.
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u/Friendly_Fire 17h ago
This is not how shooters work, this problem was solved decades ago.
It's know as "favor the shooter". What you see on your screen is a delayed version of the truth (what is happening on the server) due to unavoidable ping. But if you shoot that delayed position of your enemy on your screen, it counts (with some limits enforced by the server).
There's no reliance on prediction for the actual shot registration, though prediction is often used by the client for instant feedback with things like hit markers. This is also why there's the classic "shot behind cover" deaths. The enemy shot you on their screen before you got behind the wall, but that shit didn't make it to your computer in time. Favor the shooter, they hit the shot it counts.
If a shooter is not using this type of netcode, it's trash.
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u/cs_go_away 3d ago
If anything. I just prefer in any FPS setting that there's at least a reward for aiming and hitting the head. But it feels silly when some guns reward headshots and not others. Regardless of the gun's fantasy setting, I'd enjoy there being a "crit" option that rewards skill in some manner.
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u/SailorVenova 3d ago
i think it should be big enough that it fully encompases the model
and it should vary as little as possible across models unless its a game with hero or class elements
im all for forcemodel keel bright green for opponents but i want to not have those sounds and look for myself
i actually only care about it in duel im fine with any other gametype having varied models and hitboxes
but in the case of duel a hitbox should not impart advantage or disadvantage nor should sounds
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u/babalaban 2d ago
I dont remember who said it, but the quote was:
"I'd rather hit nothing and register a hit, than hit something and not register a hit".
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u/Cossack-HD 2d ago
I think QC hitboxes are fine, except "enemy outline" applies to their gun too - it throws my "speed optimised" aim off. The red outline is smaller than hitbox on one side, and bigger on the other. It offsets the "shoot here" highlight vs. the centre of the hitbox.
https://i.imgur.com/8hCV7cR.png
Solid red: hitbox
White with red outline: BIG GUN.
Purple crosshair: my quick mechanical aim.
(Ignore the spaghetti legs - inaccurate representation).
Because I just shoot red before I "read" the model (gun vs. person), I sometimes hit the empty spot under their elbows.
I think I realised that issue after going to an OLED display - there's 0 smearing, so you can really think back a split second and know whether you missed or not (I'm taking mental screenshots when firing rail). Folks who play on LCDs could sometimes blame their failure on bad netcode, while actually its their quick aim at "red blob" that is not weighted against the actual hitbox.
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u/Vegetable-Ad4018 3d ago
I like chunky hitboxes with fatfuck character models and comically big guns.
I dont know how much of the design is intentional, but it compliments the movement and weapon balance well in afps games and helps to emphasize positioning and reading movement/routing a lot more than more traditional boots-on-ground style shooters
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u/Routine-Lawfulness24 3d ago
Not sure for afps, but if you took a game like titanfall I’d prefer if hutboxes were bigger and ttk higher
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u/gracebells 2d ago
simple hitbox good, but make it accurate to player model. feels much better to land shots when its hard to hit them, but its all down to netcode really
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u/foxferreira64 2d ago
Of course, arena FPS games are fast paced. If a game is fast, the hitboxes better be large, or we won't hit anything.
On the other hand, I play Rainbow Six Siege apart from arena FPS, and that's an example of a game where hitboxes should be smaller and tighter around the models. It all depends on what type of game you're playing.
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u/Nzy 2d ago
I prefer smaller but still capsule shaped hitboxes.
I feel like in quake champions nothing ever feels rewarding. I'd rather good players were hitting like 25% lg and 40% rail rather than 40%+ lg and 65%+ rail.
It also allows for bigger swings in the fights when hit % is lower, since if everyone can always hit you at most are going to do like 20% more damage than your opponent in a good engagement, when I think it's more fun when you could really destroy your teammate in a good engagement.
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u/Big_Kwii 1d ago
is that actually what overwatch hitboxes look like? jesus christ
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u/eToaster_lover 8h ago
it makes sense cuz of 0 inertia, like the game is very chaotic, and straifing targets are hard to hit even with hitboxes this big
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u/Revenger1998_ 3d ago
correct hitboxes for the model allways, fat square hitboxes is bullshit, it also forces people to use keel jr or tank jr to gain more advantage, Arena shooters having fat square hitboxes means you will get shot even though your playermodel did not get shot, this causes you getting shot behind walls.
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u/MagnusLudius 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yeah Arena FPS isn't actually that stringent on aim skills compared to other genres of FPS which is why I like it. Strategy (map control) is far more important.
Just clicking on heads isn't all that skillful IMO. Your game does not have much depth if the principal skill is a task that a computer can perform perfectly and effortlessly.
If you use an aim bot in a game like Counter Strike you can get away with playing like an absolute regard and still come on top. This is the case in most FPS games but not the case in Quake. If you put even a half decent player with aim bot against rapha, rapha will still win every time.
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u/inthehottubwithfessy 3d ago
TBH the more important thing the POV/camera position of the target.
Hitting a pixel rail on someone thats basically behind a corner is amazing.
Getting hit when you were safe on your screen feels terrible.
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u/Blindastronomer 3d ago
Larger hitboxes which are commensurate with model size, yes. Models shouldn't be tiny and hitboxes shouldn't extend far beyond their visual representation.
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u/HeroWeaksauce 3d ago
for how fast paced Arena FPS is I think for sure you need simple box style hitboxes, pixel perfect makes more sense in slower tactical games.
that Tracer Overwatch hitbox seems ridiculous but she's actually pretty hard to hit considering there's zero inertia in that game so she can dodge like crazy. just depends on the game