I’m questioning if there’s ever been a good D&D video game adaptation that wasn’t trying its best to just replicate the tabletop experience, and then I’d ask if it’s worth trying when you could just continue to make good replications of the tabletop experience.
But a lot of people are. I didn’t care for BG3, but I tolerated it as a multiplayer game because it’s fun to play with friends. I also played Solasta solo, but most of my hours were co-op, because it’s just a lot more fun.
I guess for me the adventuring ‘party’ experience is a big part of D&D.
A solo experience could still be fun, but, like I said, I’m not getting excited about it.
Never played Diablo or any of the Elder Scrolls games? Even Baldur’s Gate? Those have all been very popular games based on D&D (some more closely than others).
Ya know I was really hoping that when Capcom released Mega Man X Dive Offline that it would become a standard that all live service games would adhere to…
They are making a remake, supposedly. But it appears to be in development (or possibly publishing) hell. Something that is caught up in all the other shit going on with Embracer Group.
The co-founder is definitely referring to the Gwent standalone game. I played it when open beta came out but it steadily went downhill from there until they eventually stopped working on it in 2023.
It was still a really good game by the time they stopped working on it, and one of the least greedy CCG I’ve ever seen. Hearthstone was already starting to lose players, and they had a shot at being a replacement, even if the mechanics of the game were rather different.
And then Marvel Rivals came out and the CCG landscape was just overpopulated.
If you aren’t already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can’t just drop “support” (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.
What are you suggesting? That on once a game goes online it’ll require the company by law to keep it running forever? How many companies would still release games that requires backend if they knew it’s a never ending endeavour even if they’ll lose money from it?
Running the infrastructure to host the game’s baceknd requires money, and releasing the server code as binary or open source is not something that’ll happen.
The companies could shut down their servers, if they at the same time would release the software needed to run the servers. This would allow the creation of community servers, without any costs or responsibilities for the companies
There was a time when multiplayer games all came with dedicated server binaries.
It would require devs to start planning for indefinite support during development. Wether that means releasing server software and the source code or not making the game reliant on servers in the first place is up to them.
Oh for fuck sake, this has never been a good argument, and people who keep repeating these argument-questions (almost like they’re a copy paste) either never read what Stop Killing Games demands, or lack the reading comprehension necessary to understand it.
The third option would be malicious sabotage, but I’m hoping it’s just one of the two stupidity options.
Better service for the community. Take a look over towards Spellbreak for a second and you’ll see a community that has taken what Proletariat had given them after an acquisition by Blizzard and started doing private servers to keep their game functional. I think there’s much to learn from this End-of-Service model, perhaps we could have more privately hosted servers to reduce their overhead if companies truly loved their fanbase; might even be feasible to follow that model from the start for f2p games so the official servers are more capable for tourneys and the like. Either way the goal is end user satisfaction, so if those means are preservation or archival like with Yu-Gi-Oh! Cross Duel, then so be it the fanbase does what they want ultimately, but we just ask companies to offer their olive branch so that all their precious arts don’t drown in the ever expanding sea of data.
Am not a gamer, and am not informed about your little battle. So i asked a quesion, not made an argument. From the responses to my questions it is obvious how spoiled and toxic your community is. Good luck 🩷
Just click the link and inform yourself. Could have answered the question yourself within minutes.
It’s clear you do not actually want answers at all. I hate your pretentious attitude.
I clicked, and saw an incoherent wall of text. It is not that important for me to understand what you’re whining about, and you fail to deliver your point in a manner which will result in any sympathy.
You are treating silliy video games as if it’s a matter of life and death. Why would anybody take you seriously? You make ot so easy for them to milk you for money. I suggest grow up.
“Oh no, it isn’t a 20s TikTok video!1! How could anyone understand such gibberish neatly organized text with detailed explaination of why preserving games is important!11!1”
But seriously, you are on a community about games, define yourself as not being a gamer, and clearly show you have no idea of the topic at hand, why do you even bother engaging in this conversation?
Just leave us, silly gamers, try to protect the medium we share and love, and continue on your way.
I doubt anything here is of any worth to you.
This is a public forum, and you are acting like spoiled children. I’ll comment as I please.
Take all that superior knowledge you have about infrastructure and engineering and build your own games that conforms to your world view instead of gaming all day while complaining and consuming colorful energy drinks.
If it was important to you as you claim, you wouldn’t have supported the game publishers from the get go, but you do. It is just easier and funner to shit post instead of doing anything productive, right?
Have fun in your little echo chamber of pathetic nonsense, no one will take you seriously.
FAQ page has your exact question answered - saved you one click from the link above. Clearly a lot of effort has been put into the site because online spaces we’ve enjoyed can’t be enjoyed any further even if we were interested in maintaining them ourselves as volunteers.
Gamers are by and large toxic and ignorant. The ask isn’t as straightforward as they make it seem. It would require changes to the binaries and client code beforehand. This doesn’t come for free. All the examples of ‘how it used to work in the past’ are predicated on the specific choices of development to go that route. If an application and server are not architected that way then releasing the server binaries do nothing for the community.
I’d agree for an MMO, which can be quite complex server-wise. But most “online single player” would be quite easy to modify.
I’m a software developer who worked with asynchronous online systems.
A simple disk caching system could replace any uploaded data, and any online call can be written to work with cached data with a few line of code. Heck, on some frameworks you could write a simple middleware to make it work without changing a line of the original code.
I could do it on such game in less than a week on a language I don’t know, and probably a day or two on one I know about.
Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there’s no reason it can’t work that way again. It’s one of several ways to satisfy the petition.
Q. Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.
As you are not a gamer, I’ll try to make it simple.
If a game ask for an online connection, is usually for three reasons:
multiplayer, or some kind of social interaction
drm, to make it harder to cheat, or redistribute cracked versions of said game
telemetry, either to know how players plays their game, or to sell you as an ad target
When the publisher decide to stop the online component, to save a buck, it often mean the game stops working altogether because of the DRM part, as it basically refuses to start without the proper authorization from the now defunct server.
The petition do not ask them to keep running the server indefinitely, but rather to
make it possible to bypass the DRM always online part to be able to play the single player part, if there is one. In most case, it is a simple change to do, a function to modify in order to always return “true” (game can be played)
allow the end user to self host the server. It doesn’t mean open-sourcing it, just to release the server software and allow to point to another server than the defunct ones
In both case, the code already exist, and the changes required are minimal, so why not do it? It costs barely anything to the devs/publisher, and gives the game a second life, even without official support.
But they don’t. Mostly out of greed, to push people to buy the newest, micro-transaction infused game they wish to sell, sometimes even the same game with half the content replaced by micro-transaction (Overwatch 2 being the perfect example).
They don’t want an older, maybe better game to overshadow their new shiny cash grab.
If you don’t like their approach, stop buying their games.
Servers today are much more complex than what they were 25 years ago, and making them in such a way to any idiot could run on their laptop requires substantial effort. I can see how it might not be financially feasible for every company to do. Relaaing the server software will introduce a whole new category of issues that the company will need to face. Shipping a stack of 20 independent services that are orchestrated together is not a single binary, and is not meant to run on any platform.
Well, I don’t. It doesn’t void my freedom to express my opinion on the matter.
I also maintain server (my own, sometime other people server when asked to), and even worked with an open sourced MMO server (Ryzom). Those don’t need to be hard to maintain, except if the architect is a idiot that followed the tend of “microservices”, which does’t make much sense for an MMO.
If they aren’t good enough to make software that makes sense, we’ll find a way to make them work. Don’t underestimate a band of hyperfocussed nerd.
Some guy already programmed a whole unofficial MMO server from scratch, which ended up to be even better than the official one. Unfortunately is wasn’t ever released for obvious copyright infringement reasons, but still.
1.indeed you do. Still it is advised to think before speaking. 2.I said nothing about “micro”. It sounds like you have great expertise in this area and clearly know how it all works so kudos you won 🥳
You won’t be able to do none of that, cause none of it is yours. If anything, I feel like I’m overestimating you just by having this discussion. Not clear to me why you feel so entitled to the products of others. You are a gamer, it is barly a hobby.
Games, like movie, are a way to make art. It allows ways of expression that other medias cannot.
Of course not all games are made with the artistic value in mind, like not all movies are, but those are nontheless pieces of our collective culture, be it something like a racing game, or a little platformer.
All thoses are the result of hundred, if not thousands of hours of work, from programmers, to musician, with all others support tasks in between.
For a movie, imagine if you had to constantly be connected to a server, and that suddenly, for nobother reason than saving a buck for the company owning the movie, no one could watch it anymore. Countless masterpieces would be lost to time, not because the original band was lost in a fire like many did through time, but because of someone greed and refusal to make them readable without that punny server.
That petition ask just that same treatment for video games, nothing more. We are not asking for remaster, nor a continued support on new consoles, just a way to preserve the shared memories we hold dear.
Memories of friends who played with us, friends that may not be of this world anymore. Memories of stories told and lived.
To not forget what was, what could have been, and what can be.
Even if it doesn’t work, I’d at least want to let people try and get practice doing something about a problem (even if that’s just leaving a comment on social media to direct others to sign a petition that will eventually get lawmakers’ attention with enough signatures based on that country’s laws, because that still has more chance for good than yet another comment about X Thing Bad. Even though I agree with a lot of Lemmy’s X Thing Bad takes), makes them more likely to do something in the future. At least they can walk away saying “I tried”. Some people might see no guarantee of results for their time and think of it as time wasted, and that is their choice, but I don’t really see a reason to say “that’ll never work” without any offer of alternative. Most charitably, you are trying to save them time and disappointment, trying to prevent a “it didn’t work, activism does not work, I’ll never do anything like that again” attitude if it fails, but I think a lot of people are just seeing the comment as pointless negativity.
It worked for USB C? And y’all have alternate app stores over there too. I don’t believe it’s unrealistic to guarantee that a product you sell will remain functional after support ends.
Eh, we’ll see. USB C and other app stores made Apple gain less money, whereas this petition would make it cost more to implement such a thing, and could be a sizeable problem for specific games which heavily relies on proprietary algorithms or just the game itself, such as mmorpg, small companies…
It’s honestly very little work to implement a way for a game to be offline… Basically just remove the method that checks for a server and that’s it…
What could be a bit more costly would be releasing server implementations so people can host their own game servers, but it should still be expected… Actually it wouldn’t be that hard IF it’s taking into account from the get go coz you can just release the last release before being shut down and that’s it
And it was greedy as hell because when that DLC was announced and released the game was still buggy and unfinished. The game still doesn’t feel complete without the DLC is what I hear from everyone I know and multiple reviews
The game is not only finished and complete, but Phantom Liberty was the best damn DLC I’ve ever played for any game in any genre, since the Shivering Isles for Oblivion.
I love how you’ve personally taken offense to everyone shitting on your precious cyberpunk in this thread. It was broken trash in 2020 and it’s only slightly less trash in 2025 bud. Sorry you have poor taste.
Art is subjective. You don’t get to speak for anyone but yourself. Half the world thinks what you like is shit, but go on about how you know what’s really good.
I know greed when I see it. I know cut content when I see it. A good DLC doesn’t include stuff that should’ve been in the game.
CDPR did good with the witcher series years ago. But after cyberpunk they showed how disgusting they can be. They don’t deserve money. Have fun and enjoy the game but don’t defend it, there’s no point
I’ll defend it if I want. Neither you nor anyone else gets to decide anything for me, so fuck out of here with that attitude. There’s a reason you and the people who share your opinion are getting downvoted so much in this thread. That reason is people think your opinion is shit.
That is me literally saying I’ll defend the game. It’s your words that defending the game is defending “greed”, which is a bullshit, weak ass argument.
Spoken like someone that has played about four or five video games in their entire life. It’s not even an RPG. It’s a shitty first person shooter with pointless skill trees tacked on. Even if you were to classify it as an action RPG, it doesn’t crack the top 20.
It absolutley does. Also cyberpunk actually gives you a lot of freedom on how you aproach combat. Can you play it as mindless shooter. Yup . But you can also play deus ex like that and no one calls it a shitty first person shooter ( even tho thats technicaly the easiest way to finish the game ). And as far as the world and story is concerned its equisite. As far as whetewer its an RPG or not. If mass effect is an RPG than so is cyberpunk i think . Very subjective thing in general . Definietly not a hill im willing to die on.
The game is finished. Maybe not finished to your expectations, but it is definitely finished, and is a damn fine action RPG. And Phantom Liberty is the best damn DLC for any game I’ve ever played since the Shivering Isles for Oblivion.
Calling others opinions lies just because you don’t appreciate what they’re saying is what we in the industry like to call a “bitch ass move”.
Well, The Witcher 1 and 2 weren’t open world, and those turned out pretty well, especially 2. There’s something to be said about what a game from them might gain by doing more in a smaller world.
I tried playing Witcher 2 when it came out, but couldn’t. It’s so immersion breaking when some parts of the map are blocked by some gates or invisible walls. When Witcher 3 came out I was hesitant at first remembering my bad experience with 2, but I loved it so much.
They're patching it to be playable offline, but only if you've previously downloaded the game.
Why not just leave that version up instead of delisting it? They could even sell it. Would be seen as a success story for preservation instead of another loss, and it's especially baffling because it's a fully avoidable loss.
Do you even have to pay hosting costs, if you put a game on steam or does valve not distribute your game for free?
If I’d have to guess the bigger issues with a game like this would be licensing or that delisting allows some form of tax advantageous asset depreciation.
Valve hosts it for “free” (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.
I’m guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it’s only required the first time it’s executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don’t want to anger the line investors and make it go down by working even a second on a “discontinued” game.
Pretty sure hosting costa arent it, the only thing possible woyld be licensing issues for the IP’s otherwsie they could leave it on steam forever and STILL make money off of sales. There are games that do this by making the players host their own servers each match.
Potentially, I don’t exactly know all the rights owners.
But just looking at the roster, I’d assume Arya Stark might be the most complicated. While HBO falls under WB, unsure if ol’ George signed away all rights to the character. And there’s always future deals too, since rights holders can change hands.
The reason that games are even hosted on “official” servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP’s they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.
That could be one reason, at least in a game such as MultiVersus with different IPs being used.
But they still lock down servers to their own shit when they own it all anyway and it’s because they also sell you crap to have in the game. If you had your own server, you could just give yourself the stuff they sell since all those things are still in the game somewhere and the only barrier between you and the content is their servers checking to see if you paid for them.
This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.
Games as a Service wasn’t even the fatal flaw here. Brawlhalla is another platform fighter that is doing just fine off that model. The dev team for MultiVersus just couldn’t handle the project, for one reason or another.
A lot of speculation on the specifics of what went wrong, plenty of players looking for who to blame, but there will probably never be any reliable or concrete info on what exactly happened.
This game could have easily been another Marvel Rivals. An absolute success using its strong IPs in a game type that is underrepresented. There's no other big name doing Smash Bros style combat, and definitely not outside of Nintendo's platform. The elements were all there to make this a successful game, but they completely blew the execution.
Another problem is the game director overhyping and saying “any character is possibile” and he wasn’t limiting it to warner bros’s IPs but if you’re going to do that, then they honestly should have made the game launch with at least one 3rd party character.
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Aktywne