I played it in the “open beta” two years ago. Sad that it’s come to this, the game had a lot going for it but… having all characters locked on start then weirdly shutting the game down for an extended time then coming back with everything somehow worse… everyone saw this coming.
At least it will stil be playable.
Games need to bring back locally hosted servers.
I remember back in the day I could play Warcraft II with a friend over dialup, I’d put his number in and that modem would call his house and he’d answer with his copy of Warcraft and we could play against each other over the phone line with no server.
Even as recently as the Xbox 360 you could system link games and play on multiple consoles without any connection to the internet.
I don’t see why it would be so hard to allow for a locally hosted server on most games. They would still be playable indefinitely without need of any kind of central server system.
And they don’t need to be mutually exclusive, Halo 2 allowed for you to play both on Xbox live and system link games
It’s not that it’s hard. It’s that they see it as interfering with their business model. Not only would that remove the likelihood of you seeing other people’s new skins, it also removes a dependence on them, where they can create forced obsolescence. Plus I suspect that they fear more piracy.
It wouldn’t be, necessarily. A bunch of games (survival games, in particular) still give you that choice. It’s cheap, reliable and doesn’t need a ton of people playing your game.
The problem is then you can’t do matchmaking, you need a server browser, which is a lot clunkier. And it does get harder to avoid cheating and so on. The experience is also dependent on how close the server is from you, and if it’s just some guy’s computer the server goes away when they’re not playing.
For fighting games specifically, where “room matches” are still a thing in most games, I do see it becoming an option as a separate mode. And man, if you’re doing something like Multiversus I do think you should consider having it ready to go as a fallback, because this is a bad look and hurts future games that may want to give this a shot.
You can do both dedicated servers and official matchmaking servers. It’s what counter strike does as an example.
That way if the official servers go offline, you only lose the matchmaking, but the game isn’t totally dead.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say there at the bottom. I think that’s a better fit if you assign it by mode, especially in fighting games, where the ranked/unranked/lobby difference is well established, but at least it should be in the back pocket for a F2P fighting game to avoid this scenario.