Last Epoch 1.0 Overview by Game Director, Judd Cobler Last Epoch is Releasing 2024-02-21T17:00:00Z (UTC)! Welcome everyone to the Patch Notes for Last Epoch 1.0! It’s been an amazing road to this point, and it’s unreal to be writing patch notes without using the term “Beta Patch”. With this patch Last Epoch will officially be leaving Early Access. We couldn’t have made it to this point without all of you, our amazing community driving the world of Eterra alongside us. We ...
Man, this thinking sucks.
No, the problem is that there’s no reason these games should have to disappear except that they were engineered to. All games are worth preserving, even bad games, even old games. It doesn’t matter that my friends and I were perhaps the only people in the world playing Rainbow Six 3 at that moment in 2014, because that game having LAN meant that we could still play it, and we would always have the opportunity to play it. The Crew, much to my surprise, actually found a substantial audience, and it is a different game than its two sequels, but now Ubisoft can force obsolescence in that game that people today are still enjoying in an effort to get them to buy one of the sequels. They shouldn’t have to buy the sequels to keep playing, and more than that, they should be able to go back to the old game whenever they want.
Again. Ideologically, I agree with you.
When devs are already crunching 60-80 hour work weeks to launch a game and are increasingly worried about their studio being shuttered because they only have one or two fan favorite games in the pipeline? I don’t at all blame them for not taking the time to prioritize it to the 10 people who want to play the game three years after their unemployment benefits ran out.
Then they can’t blame me when I buy from their competitors instead, who prioritized a critical feature in the development of their game. (And also, building the game this way is a larger drain on their resources than if they built it without the server requirement. They just want microtransaction dollars.)
Okay? Obviously you should buy what you value and if LAN support is a high priority, buy based on that.
The point I have been making is that preventing the 50 people left playing a game after ten years from continuing to play is not “planned obsolescence”. It is just the reality of software development.
It is planned obsolescence. I’m quite familiar with software development and its realities. They knowingly built a game that won’t continue to function in multiplayer after the plug is pulled.
In any case, you and I aren’t going to agree, but I take issue with their definition of “full offline” for the reasons we’ve already discussed, and I’m disappointed that the answer I found in this thread is that they’re not interested in adding LAN to this mode.