Yeah, but see, my mate Joe, he just doesn’t run the sign up page or authentication or the matchmaking or the seasonal DLC or the voice chat or the community forums.
He just enters some stuff by hand into the Oracle DB and off we go.
I’m serious. Big corporations tend to overcomplicate this stuff all the time. Especially because they tend to run several components as one. But when you break it down each one is not that complicated. I’ve done that. As my job. Saying it’s not feasible is a massive strawman.
Because as always, if they can do it so can we. This will never change.
Speaking of TED Talks, I’m not reading all of that.
But nobody is talking about running a service. Sure, someone might open up Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045 Big Continuation Service, run like the original even with support staff. But maybe I’m fine with Joe’s ACPC2045 server, because he’s my mate and we just want to goof around.
There are plenty of fan projects out there that run entire big services for their games. Keeping MMOs alive but also entirely new services based on stuff like Minecraft.
If ACPC2045 wants to make this into an expensive complicated (for them and us) endeavour, let them. There will be plenty of other games that will handle the new requirements with grace because they are not incompetent. Look how quickly Ubisoft was able to turn around with The Crew 2.
Why is it not feasible? This is simply bullshit. If a company can do it the end user can do it as well. Even if they needed a thousand servers with 5090s to run the application it would still be a way to do it.
And nobody is saying that this would be the requirement. The requirement is “to keep it in a playable state”. How they achieve that is up to them.
And it wasn’t even news back then. Almost immediately after the BG3 release Swen Vincke talked about the next project being an in-house IP again. And not much later they quit working on a DLC.
The multiplayer is supposedly incredible. But I remember being extremely whelmed by the main game.
But it’s hard to remember the mid games. Because it is very likely that they didn’t leave any lasting impression.
And especially if previous titles in a series or from a studio were great a mid game would feel disappointingly bad. Although compared to other games they might actually still be considered great.
Xeen was what I thought of our first “proper” game. So many good memories. I played it like it’s real time, spamming the attack button without any strategy.
Still play it every so often. And thanks to ScummVM I could play it on a toaster if I wanted to.
There already are some projects that make it work. I haven’t looked at the specifics yet but as far as I understand it everything that can be handled as a library call as native ARM code does just that and only pure x86 calls are emulated. And since nowadays so much stuff is abstracted away and the heavy lifting is done by Vulkan the performance tends to be very good.
I mean, it is supposedly already a thing on Android. And there are rumors that Valve have been trying it out for Deckard. So this could very much come this year or so.