"Game companies do not want us preserving their abandoned online titles"
Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2018 8:27 pm
https://www.techspot.com/news/73370-gam ... their.html
Interesting article that someone linked me, given the nature of this project how do you guys feel about this kind of thing and the ruling? I'm glad it doesn't necessairly affect running free projects like this, but you have to admit it's kind of annoying and frustrating that, quoted in the article, there is no need to preserve online games with the resurgence in "retro gaming."
First of all, we don't need a resurgence in "retro gaming", all it is, is a money grabbing opportunity for companies to re-sell stuff to people who will buy it because it's "cool" and will play it for 5 minutes until they realize why they stopped playing it the first time. I don't care about Mario Bros anymore. These old games still work, and so do their consoles. Minus nuclear holocausts blanketing civilizations in death or comets obliterating earth and it's inhabitants, there is NOTHING stopping old GAME CONSOLES from running and playing games. You just need to power them and plug them into a tv, 10-20-30...100 years from now (if the components hold up) they will still demonstrate that they can and will work, and be playable. They do not need preservation, they're doing fine on their own with their own limitless shelf life. Not to mention... you know.. emulators.
MMORPG's on the other hand are at the mercy of a login server barring access to the content that is the game living on your hard drive, and when the servers are nixxed, the game lives trapped in a coma, serverside either archived for potential re-interest influx to be a money grab (which never happens so we never see the game again) or deleted forever and the client side just dumb graphics without instruction that will not even run without the server telling it what to do. I honestly hope we can learn from these mistakes and future developers make games which will run forever and can be made online with no effort. Take Diablo 2 and Minecraft for example. Say Battle Net goes down forever right this second, there is still single player but.... There is still a loginserver-less tcp/ip method (that also ignores unique cd-keys) to connect to friends playing, you can still create an 8-game match as long as someone starts the game first and gives his or her friends their IP, or perhaps they are on the same lan, it's just a bit easier without the WAN to worry about. Same goes with Minecraft. Say the java editon login servers and auth all gets killed off? It's easy to crack the client to run without auth and the official (non cracked) server jars can literally be made to ignore auth for what's called "offline mode" and everyone goes about their business playing online still.... (and with heavy emphasis here)... forever. Games like Vanguard suffered a real bad fate, and again I hope we can all learn from the mistake. Keeping an old game around by giving it's server code and client to everyone for free once it's done and over with does not hurt anyone. And if someone tries to monetize project1999 or VGOEmulator, they SHOULD be punished to the fullest extent of the law. This is all for fun, not money. If I were running a game company, you best believe I would be designing a product so that it could live on forever if my company could not keep running it. Wether it's a flip of the switch and all code gets released upon closure of the official servers, or a system like Diablo 2.
IF Son...err "DBG" closes eq2 down tomorrow I cannot play eq2 ever again, but I can still play decades old NES games sitting in my closet that witnessed generations rise and fall through the cracks of my closet doors while I played games like Guild Wars, Eq2 and SWTOR.... but 20 years from now in 2038 for example when one of these games enters my mind I can't simply plug some console in or load some software on my computer, ever. It will never happen because they're gone forever, to be the bastard generation of video games that have an actual shelf life.
Look I get it, nothing lasts forever but asking a simple MMO to be around "forever" isn't asking much, considering the lifespan of the universe and our existence here on earth.
I would ask people into older movies and music, and tv shows, a hypothetical question. How would you feel if in order to play your DVDs and CD's on your home dvd or cd player that it required an internet connection with an auth server, and one day you learned it has to be discontinued? Now you can't enjoy works of art because of a stupid copyright and DRM method. But don't worry, you can just "remember" how good it was when you stare at the disks on your shelf unable to play them. Thats how I feel about the death of MMO's. It just irks me people can freely relive nostalgia and drive classic cars to a car show with classic cars, watch classic movies, listen to classic music, look at century-old paintings, buy stuff from antique stores, and yet here we are battling with packet capture software before it's too late trying to rebuild and preserve a game that has been around a fraction of the life of a retro console that we shouldn't have to bother worrying about preserving because it should be second nature to play it later down the road.
Interesting article that someone linked me, given the nature of this project how do you guys feel about this kind of thing and the ruling? I'm glad it doesn't necessairly affect running free projects like this, but you have to admit it's kind of annoying and frustrating that, quoted in the article, there is no need to preserve online games with the resurgence in "retro gaming."
First of all, we don't need a resurgence in "retro gaming", all it is, is a money grabbing opportunity for companies to re-sell stuff to people who will buy it because it's "cool" and will play it for 5 minutes until they realize why they stopped playing it the first time. I don't care about Mario Bros anymore. These old games still work, and so do their consoles. Minus nuclear holocausts blanketing civilizations in death or comets obliterating earth and it's inhabitants, there is NOTHING stopping old GAME CONSOLES from running and playing games. You just need to power them and plug them into a tv, 10-20-30...100 years from now (if the components hold up) they will still demonstrate that they can and will work, and be playable. They do not need preservation, they're doing fine on their own with their own limitless shelf life. Not to mention... you know.. emulators.
MMORPG's on the other hand are at the mercy of a login server barring access to the content that is the game living on your hard drive, and when the servers are nixxed, the game lives trapped in a coma, serverside either archived for potential re-interest influx to be a money grab (which never happens so we never see the game again) or deleted forever and the client side just dumb graphics without instruction that will not even run without the server telling it what to do. I honestly hope we can learn from these mistakes and future developers make games which will run forever and can be made online with no effort. Take Diablo 2 and Minecraft for example. Say Battle Net goes down forever right this second, there is still single player but.... There is still a loginserver-less tcp/ip method (that also ignores unique cd-keys) to connect to friends playing, you can still create an 8-game match as long as someone starts the game first and gives his or her friends their IP, or perhaps they are on the same lan, it's just a bit easier without the WAN to worry about. Same goes with Minecraft. Say the java editon login servers and auth all gets killed off? It's easy to crack the client to run without auth and the official (non cracked) server jars can literally be made to ignore auth for what's called "offline mode" and everyone goes about their business playing online still.... (and with heavy emphasis here)... forever. Games like Vanguard suffered a real bad fate, and again I hope we can all learn from the mistake. Keeping an old game around by giving it's server code and client to everyone for free once it's done and over with does not hurt anyone. And if someone tries to monetize project1999 or VGOEmulator, they SHOULD be punished to the fullest extent of the law. This is all for fun, not money. If I were running a game company, you best believe I would be designing a product so that it could live on forever if my company could not keep running it. Wether it's a flip of the switch and all code gets released upon closure of the official servers, or a system like Diablo 2.
IF Son...err "DBG" closes eq2 down tomorrow I cannot play eq2 ever again, but I can still play decades old NES games sitting in my closet that witnessed generations rise and fall through the cracks of my closet doors while I played games like Guild Wars, Eq2 and SWTOR.... but 20 years from now in 2038 for example when one of these games enters my mind I can't simply plug some console in or load some software on my computer, ever. It will never happen because they're gone forever, to be the bastard generation of video games that have an actual shelf life.
Look I get it, nothing lasts forever but asking a simple MMO to be around "forever" isn't asking much, considering the lifespan of the universe and our existence here on earth.
I would ask people into older movies and music, and tv shows, a hypothetical question. How would you feel if in order to play your DVDs and CD's on your home dvd or cd player that it required an internet connection with an auth server, and one day you learned it has to be discontinued? Now you can't enjoy works of art because of a stupid copyright and DRM method. But don't worry, you can just "remember" how good it was when you stare at the disks on your shelf unable to play them. Thats how I feel about the death of MMO's. It just irks me people can freely relive nostalgia and drive classic cars to a car show with classic cars, watch classic movies, listen to classic music, look at century-old paintings, buy stuff from antique stores, and yet here we are battling with packet capture software before it's too late trying to rebuild and preserve a game that has been around a fraction of the life of a retro console that we shouldn't have to bother worrying about preserving because it should be second nature to play it later down the road.