Shogo had a mod called Squishie where one player was normal size and on a team by themselves, and all the other players were tiny and on the other team. It was the most fun I've ever had at a LAN party in those early 00's. I'm surprised no one ever picked this up and turned it into a real game.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/squishie

I assume those asymmetric multiplayer games are hard to maintain an audience. Everyone wants to be the super charged monster, nobody wants to be the squishie. Unless you can shore up the difference with bots, you are going to have to play dramatically more rounds as the less-fun squishie.

I think you could argue that Battlefront 2 allows this kind of asymmetrical multiplayer game.

The heroes on the other side are largely over powered compared to the standard trooper. While everyone wants to play the hero, it takes time to build up points to switch to it. It allows every odd character models, where we have bb8 running around quickly and extremely small hitbox.

I do think there are opportunities in this area. When I play fortnite I get disappointed that everyone has to fit into a specific skeleton. Let games be weird.

Never played Battlefront, but that sounds like a short duration powerup mode?

I was thinking of something like Evolve[0] where it is a 4v1 kind of humans vs monster affair. There are also horror games that follow this formula -one psycho killer vs regular humans. I assume all the fun is being the monster, less amusing to be the weakling running and hiding.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolve_(video_game)

Dead by Daylight has stayed pretty popular. It's an asymmetric multiplayer game where one player plays as a horror movie killer, while the other four try to accomplish objectives and escape. Balancing the game can be a bit tricky though, since when 80% of your population plays as survivors, there's an incentive to keep them happy.

There have been various attempts at that type of asymmetric multiplayer over the years and most of them have had serious issues with game balance. I think the most successful has been Dead by Daylight and at high levels of play usually turns into a deadlock.

Rats maps! If your mutliplayer game had a map editor, you'd be sure there'd be one of those massive house maps available.

Most FPS's of the era had that sort of map. Return to Castle Wolfenstein had Kung Fu Grip, which I played many, many hours of. The map was built by a clan member and we used to have map test nights.

ut2004 had the make something unreal contest which really kicked maps and mods up a notch.

i think even ut99 had some of those "we're small" maps like Simpsons house, etc.

but yeah, kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, all seemingly covered.

I don't remember that one, but I loved de_rats (same idea) so much I stopped playing CS when it fell out of favour.