'member when we were able to self host servers of our games? I member. CoD4 was awesome because of that, later the pirated version of MW2 too. These games (the first MW and MW2) are still alive because of that.
If you’re playing on ps3 or emulation you can play online using lbpunion.com they’re currently looking into ps4 support, but just know that it requires CFW.
I really hope that governments, especially the EU, recognise the isse server shutdowns and games being lost to history poses. It should be illegal for companies to make your already purchased games unplayable if not community hosted alternatives exist.
On that note it should also be fully legal to emulate and freely distribute any game that isn’t on sale anymore. Years of cultural history are being destroyed for corporate profit.
I agree. Hell, older games could be put on digital stores right now. The PS3 had a ton of PS1 emulated classics, and even then there were a bunch left off for unknown (or licensing) reason.
I don’t really expect a business to be forced to run a game in perpetuity, but at least they shouldn’t be allowed to C&D you from doing it if they aren’t.
They would never have such expectation if they simply allowed players to host it to begin with. This used to be the norm, until companies figured out that it’s easier to control, monetize and force obsolescence to push players into a newer product if they are the only ones hosting servers.
I’m a developer. It’s work to do anything, code doesn’t grow on the LLM tree yet. That’s a feature that would have to be implemented. Anything you ask the business to put effort in is a negative to the cause (and the cause is good), something for the businesses to latch onto to stop the law from changing.
The best argument you can make is ‘let us figure it out, just don’t sue us’. Anything else you get is a blessing.
It’s work to do anything, but we routinely see small indie studios managing to release player-hosted games just fine, while large studios don’t bother. Even though it also costs them more to run all the servers on their own. So I’m not so sure it’s just a matter of saving costs.
Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Yeah… For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn’t mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn’t be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It’s not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it’s a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The “protocol” is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
Arguably the DRM is only worth it for the first month or so after launch. Once the sales start dropping it’s pointless. It’s annoying to the consumer either way though.
Sorry we cannot afford to pay the DRM licensing fee. As a result we will no longer be able to inconvenience our customers or prevent people who were never going to pay for our game anyway from playing.
It’s twice as funny in this game because they added Denuvo a year after release. Meaning all pirates got the game DRM free on day one while paying customers got Denuvo patched in.
But honestly the word “quietly” being anywhere in any article’s title or anything has become the biggest red flag for just click baiting the piss out of something. I almost always take the title and throw it out the window after I see quietly in any title.
Combat is certanly not its strongest point, I wouldn’t call it repetitive, I found it fun at best and serviceable at worst. The best part of the game for me was traversing Tokyo by night, the powers your character has make it very enjoyable and the landscape is beautifully crafted. Also there are a lot of Japan urban legends and folklore mixed in there too. I’d say it’s a solid 20 hours experience. But it you are in it mostly for the combat I wouldn’t recommend it to you.
Oh this sounds lovely.
I’m not in it for the combat at all, I was afraid I’d have to suffer through it, but if it isn’t too bad, no problems for me. Thanks!
Yeah, some games like this are more about the mood, the settings and the exploration, even if it and empty alley or some random convenience store than the actual gameplay.
I suppose they only did it now due to some license agreement expiring?
Yep, if I understand it right, Denuvo charges an annual fee to be used. That's why you always see it getting removed after the game loses relevance, when sales aren't enough to justify paying for Denuvo anymore.
Kind of weird how, because Bethesda (and other publishers) are Denuvo's consumer, this particular anti-consumer license agreement is actually benefiting the players, haha.
Probably because announcing it would require sharing the reason for it and thus lead to questions about why they and others are still ruining other games with Denuvo…
I was telling my coworker about how annoyed I am at Ubisoft and their many anti-consumer practices and he shrugs and goes, “I kinda like separate launchers.”
ign.com
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