I played it in the “open beta” two years ago. Sad that it’s come to this, the game had a lot going for it but… having all characters locked on start then weirdly shutting the game down for an extended time then coming back with everything somehow worse… everyone saw this coming.
At least it will stil be playable.
So bizarre to me that a game has to be a runaway hit to even remain accessible for any length of time.
Stopping updates I get (and good, most game updates are annoying), but shutting down servers completely and especially delisting it seem so over the top.
Fighting Game of the Year 2022, but apparently even that’s not successful enough.
Games need to bring back locally hosted servers.
I remember back in the day I could play Warcraft II with a friend over dialup, I’d put his number in and that modem would call his house and he’d answer with his copy of Warcraft and we could play against each other over the phone line with no server.
Even as recently as the Xbox 360 you could system link games and play on multiple consoles without any connection to the internet.
I don’t see why it would be so hard to allow for a locally hosted server on most games. They would still be playable indefinitely without need of any kind of central server system.
And they don’t need to be mutually exclusive, Halo 2 allowed for you to play both on Xbox live and system link games
It’s not that it’s hard. It’s that they see it as interfering with their business model. Not only would that remove the likelihood of you seeing other people’s new skins, it also removes a dependence on them, where they can create forced obsolescence. Plus I suspect that they fear more piracy.
It wouldn’t be, necessarily. A bunch of games (survival games, in particular) still give you that choice. It’s cheap, reliable and doesn’t need a ton of people playing your game.
The problem is then you can’t do matchmaking, you need a server browser, which is a lot clunkier. And it does get harder to avoid cheating and so on. The experience is also dependent on how close the server is from you, and if it’s just some guy’s computer the server goes away when they’re not playing.
For fighting games specifically, where “room matches” are still a thing in most games, I do see it becoming an option as a separate mode. And man, if you’re doing something like Multiversus I do think you should consider having it ready to go as a fallback, because this is a bad look and hurts future games that may want to give this a shot.
You can do both dedicated servers and official matchmaking servers. It’s what counter strike does as an example.
That way if the official servers go offline, you only lose the matchmaking, but the game isn’t totally dead.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say there at the bottom. I think that’s a better fit if you assign it by mode, especially in fighting games, where the ranked/unranked/lobby difference is well established, but at least it should be in the back pocket for a F2P fighting game to avoid this scenario.
Well, that’s the problem of GaaS. It used to be games cost however much to make and you were recouping expenses after. These days games cost money to run, on account of all the centralized backend and dedicated server cost to keep everything locked down and enable matchmaking and microtransactions.
The bizarre thing is this zombie state where pieces of the game work, but only if you bought stuff ahead of time. The idea of F2P fighting games makes some sense on the surface, but with the way audiences work in the genre it may not be feasible because… who the hell is going to buy into a fighting game that poofs into the ether the moment someone else gets a Mai Shiranui DLC again?
Looking at you, 2XKO. I played Rising Thunder. I remember.
Rising Thunder was eventually released for free, server binaries and all, years later, but I don’t have the same faith in 2XKO.
Wasn’t Rising Thunder the one that at least handled part of shutdown right by semi-open sourcing?
But yeah, it’s all part of a wider problem. Personally I don’t want an invasive devloper over-tuning fighting games all the time, and I don’t want any microtransactions. But unless you keep dangling new shiny, very few players will stick with a given game, making it hard to find matches on-demand.
It’s fine and natural for populations of an online game to wane over time. Trying to cheat that comes with too many negative consequences.
Right, I don’t even know how you would cheat it. Down at this point, I guess I’m just lamenting that more games aren’t able to keep healthy communities after dev support ends.
At that point, you go to Discord, either with friends or the game’s community. It’s pretty much mathematically impossible to sustain the kinds of populations you find at a game’s launch.
At the very least it should allow locally hosted online games.
There should be a law allowing full refunds of a game if its core service is taken offline without implementing a workaround. It should be treated the same way as planned obsolescence.
Companies aren’t motivated to allow self-hosting at launch because there’s no money in it. And they’re not motivated to implement self hosting after they’ve made their money and then take the service down because there’s no money in it.
Implement the workaround, open source the software, or force the publisher to issue a refund to anyone who requests one. That should be the standard.
There’s not just no money in it, they see incentive in killing their old products thoroughly in order to better sell their new ones.
I mean half these games could do some form of self-hosting or Peer to Peer. It makes no sense that Multiverses needed to run on some centralized service. I wonder what made all the dinosaur survival games allow self-hosting, a trend I noticed.
That seems unreasonable to you, because you are a peon. You mean nothing to profits, so you will stop playing and you will like it. Now, buy our other products.