I remember growing up with my Nintendo 64, and thinking the original Xbox was the greatest I could ever achieve. I remember never having a PC for years and years, and dreaming of the day I could play Rock Raiders and Red Alert again.
I remember finally getting one, and playing Doom 3 until my disc drive broke.
I remember “graduating” to online play with StarCraft, and never thinking “what’s going to happen if my connection goes down?” I remember making the leap to proper PvE with Garry’s Mod, and going on that journey with the friends I’d made into Sven Co-op and Left 4 Dead. I remember all the games we played leading up to today, like Payday, Borderlands, and EYE. I’ll remember the games we’re playing now, like Deep Rock, MechWarrior 5, and Hypercharge.
But when Outriders, Darktide, and all the games of the modern day are dead, that’ll be that, and I’ll still be here playing Vigilante 8 - because the only thing it’s ever tried to sell me is a night at Las Vegas.
It’s a bit early to have pitchforks out over this. It’s not a flip of a switch, but it’s also not difficult to allow private servers/offline play if something does happen to them. TLDR it can be a reactive decision.
Honestly, this is why I hate dedicated servers only games. I still play games from 20 years ago because they’re fun. I wanna play games from 10 years ago because they’re fun. If Darktide remains on its only online live servers and doesn’t have offline or p2p then 10-20 years down the line I won’t be able to play this game.
Well just let people host their servers, that’s all. Like L4D or Minecraft does for example. Doesn’t matter if the server software uses the same PC you’re playing as a client on or not - the key point is being able to host a server. Dedicated servers are actually a more versatile solution.
it sucks to be like this but I feel like this is the real concession being made for live service games and the future of gaming diablo 2 resurrected for all of its development people were hoping it would have the same TCP/IP connect ability and even the ability to modify the game files for private mod support but resurrected got none of those and so those community will not get to feel the work made from the older popular private servers something I’m sure no one here cares about but the point I guess I’m trying to make is there will most defiantly be games lost to the world because of this and I see little we can do as players to change this everything is online everything is data brick and mortar stores and physical copy have been going away for a while suffice a few upstarts that take pride in turning indie titles into physical cartridges and CDs and one of the only things left console players can say they have over PC players most of the time despite having and needing patches usually to fix things done after those retail copy have left the places they come from I agree it sucks I wish it wasn’t like this but we only have the future I hope modders and real fans pick up these after support I hope wether its legislation or just precedent things get decided and made to maintain these systems o games to be preserved after there life goes to obsolescence but to be real it doesn’t look good and I only have hope