There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.
“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.
Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.
MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).
Devs have numerous options for how to address the SKG initiative. The top three that come to my mind are:
Release server binaries (along with modifying clients to have a setting to connect to the right server)
Modify multiplayer to work over LAN (good when the server’s only/main job is matchmaking)
Modify the game itself to no longer require online connectivity
In the case of live service games, I would suggest option 3 is the most appropriate. If the main gameplay is singleplayer, but it’s online so you can dole out achievements and gatekeep content, the answer is simple: stop doing that. Patch it to all work in-client. And keep in mind that this will be a requirement at end-of-life from the beginning. If it’s an unexpected requirement, that’s going to be a huge development cost. If it’s expected, making that EOL change easy to implement will be part of the code architecture from the start.
It’s called Cheonggyecheon, 청계천. Google Maps in Korea is really, really poor (for legal reasons). The satellite quality doesn’t even come close to capturing this (you can barely even tell it’s there), and Street View is just from the road (as of 2018 at the most recent) where you can see that it’s there, but not get much of a sense of it. There are a very small number of those individual non-path Street View photos.
I lived in Busan at the time this project was done, and visited Seoul only a few weeks after it opened. I didn’t know anything about urbanism at the time, I just knew it was such an incredibly nice place to be.
I managed to find aoe3 and aom on the site by using a site-filtered Google search. Couldn’t find 1 or 2, but with both of those that I found being “remake”, I suspect the two I didn’t find would be the same.
It’s interesting, and perhaps highlights how vague the line is between remake and remaster. AoM I can see being called a remake (at a bit of a stretch), but 2 & 3 are pretty solidly remasters in my mind, due to being entirely in the original engine with just a bit of new QoL features and improved graphics added.
And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison
Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.
I’m not aware of any allegations relating to Age of Mythology or any of the Forgotten Empires–lead Age games. It would strike me as unlikely, given the nature of these games as remasters of ancient code by a group formed initially as modders for AoE2.
A different situation from aoe4, which was developed primarily by Relic, which is a much more conventional game development company, and was developed from scratch.
I’m very nervous about the game’s future, given the AoE3 remake was just officially mothballed last week and AoM has fewer active players on Steam.
But for the game in its current state, I’d say that yes, it’s really, really good. It made a fair few changes from the old version, nearly all of which are excellent improvements. They said their goal was to make this game the game you remember playing through nostalgia goggles, rather than being strictly faithful to the original, and I think they did that really well. You can build bigger armies and reuse god powers. Better quality of life features, etc.
The Chinese expansion releases next month, and they’ve committed to at least one more expansion after that (by preselling the Premium Edition with the first 2 expansions). Aztects or something else from the Americas is likely. If it turns out those expansions are going to be cheap and rushed and crap just to meet their contractual obligations, that’s really unfortunate. I really hope that won’t happen. But in the worst case…the game with what they’ve released already is really good.
Feel free to head over to !aom if you want to discuss more.
I should say, this is when I play ranked games at a slightly-above-average Elo. RTS games have a reputation for trending to go much longer at very low Elos because players aren’t good at doing aggressive strategies. I dunno how much this would apply in AoM though, compared to AoE2 (which is my main source for this point) because defensive buildings are much stronger in AoE2 than AoM.
fwiw in my experience, most Age of Mythology: Retold games last about 10–15 minutes. So you could usually get 2 games in if you’ve got half an hour free.
Oh, so they have. I dunno what that means precisely. I think I saw they stopped selling the old AoE3 version, but last I checked AoM EE and AoE2HD were still for sale, but deliberately greyed out and renamed to make it clearer that they’re the old versions. Not sure if they’re still for sale or not as of now.