One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones (from say the last 15 years or so). For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary).
But modern games that rely on matchmaking through the developer/publisher? Forget it, when they go down, there's no saving them, alas.
So really this is a pretty clear-cut case of functionality deteriorating because the maker of the game has way more power than before to change the game _after_ the customer bought it (the recent brouhaha where BMW or whoever offered a subscription to boost your car's top speed by unlocking a speed lock in software also comes to mind, not to mention "purchased" streaming-only movies disappearing forever once the streaming service dies, etc.).
Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It would do a lot for brand reputation. For some reason it seems like only in the last 2 years have publishers been just barely waking up to reputation actually mattering.
Really bizarre era of consumer behavior. 'You're gonna buy my crapware games and you're gonna like it! You're gonna read my articles shitting on you and you're gonna like it!'
Cyberpunk (as much as I love it) and Battlefield 2042 were inevitable symbolic trainwrecks. <10k daily players for the latest Battlefield title? Time to wake up.
You can't run a hacked server that ignores license state or hacking bans if you have no access to the server software. They disguise it under a claim of convenience, a feature that you match against similar-experience players, but you're right, it's ultimately an antifeature.
Gamers put up with a lot of crap, between exploited ring0 DRM, platform exclusives, the loss of consumer rights (like refunds and resale) and crappy ports from consoles. I don't understand how they get away with it. I might just be old, but I've changed my entire purchasing game strategy to ignore games that fall foul of these things.
I'm sure that EA would love to kill Battlefield 4. But it will never die, because players can run and moderate dedicated servers.
Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago. Battlefield 5 is practically the same game, arguably worse, yet was able to steal most of 1's player base because support (and moderation) were effectively dropped by EA during the release of 5.
Anti-cheat is the newest (and deadliest) iteration of this pattern. CoD Warzone is free to play, so long as you run it on Windows, and not in a VM.
Worst of all, this means the burden of moderation has been moved to anti-cheat itself, even though any experienced forum moderator can tell you that moderation itself is based on social interaction, not technical behavior.
While I'm sure both copy protection and planned obsolescence are considerations, I think most of us neglect the bigger elephant in the room:
Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore.
Times change, gamers might have been tinkerers and hobbyists who accepted needing to mess with their software and perhaps even hardware (memory address allocations, anyone?!), but that was 30 to 40 years ago. We're in the 21st century now, more than 1/5th of the way to the 22nd, and gaming has become mainstream.
Gamers today just want to play games, messing with the computer (what's a computer?) is above their pay grade. Games today route multiplayer through their own matchmaking servers because Player-2-Player matchmaking /fucking sucks/, it's janky under ideal circumstances let alone normal. Gamers today don't want to deal with network shenanigans, they just want to play; so devs and publishers oblige by handling more things on their end simplifying the experience.
Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore.
The gamers of 30 to 40 years ago have moved on to messing with "home labs" and Raspberry Pis and 3D printing and shitposting on HN.
I'm not sure that's true. The games that allow or encourage tinkering have pretty decent modding communities. What were we doing 30 years ago that we aren't today? The only mainstream thing I can think of are devices like Game Genie.
Completely with you on matchmaking. The pathetic limits on these things. You've not lived until you've had a dozen friends all try to climb in/on a drop ship in Tribes 2 in a 64v64 match. That was worth carting a CRT to a lan gaming convention alone. But I don't believe players prefer this, they just don't have a choice. I much prefer the old server-list model.
>What were we doing 30 years ago that we aren't today?
Messing with computers.
PC gaming today is as simple as going out to Best Buy or Costco, buying a "gaming" desktop, come home, unbox it, plug everything in, initialize (note: not install) Windows, install Steam, and Bob's your uncle.
Most of us hailing from the 20th century learned how computers worked because we kind of had to to run the games we wanted to play. Memory address allocations, DLL hell, driver hell, registry tricks, picking out parts and putting it all together; all stuff gamers today simply don't have to deal with. Windows Update will even figure out most if not all the drivers for you.
And before anyone says it: Yes yes, I know buying a "gaming" desktop from Best Buy or Costco isn't ideal. But guess what? We are outdated oldtimers. We definitely know how to get the best stuff, but gamers simply don't need the best anymore. Computers have become household appliances, not tinkerers' toys to be handled by wizards. So what if that desktop from Best Buy craps out? They just go and buy another one like you would buy another Playstation and Bob's your uncle.
Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore, most people don't mess with computers anymore.
If we only allow "tinkering" to mean fixing things that should work, sure: Stuff works better today. But I include hardware tuning and software modding in that too, and both are vastly more powerful and present than they were in the 90s.
My experience ~30 years ago involves a 386, big-box computer, Window 3.1 pre-installed. My options for tinkering (outside the battle for HIMEM) were pressing a turbo button and hex-editing File Manager to File Mangler. There was no hardware modding scene at that level, just a choice of massively expensive storage and RAM. I'm sure there was more that you could describe as maintenance but I don't consider myself any less of a hacker because I don't have to run "hdsit" before I shut down.
Did I do more stuff? Sure. I didn't have a huge number of games so writing your own, playing with tools was pretty much your only option, and I would agree with a characterisation that people fiddle with computers less because they have less contact time with an actual desktop environment outside of the browser. We are spoilt for choice.
But PC gamers still tinker. The have hardware options unimaginable in the 90s and the scale of game modding scenes for things like The Witcher 3, GTA5, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Minecraft, Souls and Rimworld eclipse those efforts in the 90s, many times over. Shader beautifiers weren't even possible. Is it niche? Probably, but PC gaming has always been niche.
That used to be the case, now it's asset protection because the only way people will pay for skins, hats, virtual shoes, and pink guns is if you can't load arbitrary assets.
If a server says: load whatever skin you want... well, why would you pay for it?
This is also why modding got killed off, you can't sell people stuff if someone else will make better assets for free and just puts them up for download. Even if integrity or security was a big issue, that's been solved since quake 3 and ut99 with integrity checks and server-side load controls (ironically, the same ones that are now used in locked-down games to make selling different coloured virtual shirts a thing).
Gamers are a "special" target market that regularly purchases products from companies with contempt for them. The top examples are EA and Blizzard. I'm unsure whether to attribute it to simple addiction, misplaced brand loyalty, or something else. With regard to the DRM and anti-cheats that ironically make your system even less secure, a lot of gamers are so scared of cheaters that they'll put up with anything.
Part of it is that a lot of kids who grew up in the current era of games only understand the game that they were handed, where creating servers is easy and matchmaking is table stakes, AA or AAA level production values are "good" and anything else that isn't "stylized" or "retro" is potentially disqualifying.
Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is.
Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam.
"Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it.
I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.
Ultimately as a consumer, I just don't care. Other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't get much enjoyment at all out of playing very old games. For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better.
I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
> For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better.
Hard disagree here. Some subgenres don't even have any newer games at all.
And even for genres that have been embraced by the mainstream, often they are all polished into the same shape. Yeah, there are plenty of conveniences now that older games might not have but a lot uniqueness is also lost in the process. How many modern games still expect you to navigate an environment yourself instead of feeding you questmarkers and triply-redundant messages and reminders of what you need to be doing next? How many shooters that just focus on the shooting instead of feeling the need to add some skinner-box-inducing RPG-lite mechanics. How many Point & Click adventures that even come close to scope or engrossing art styles of the classics? Why is Planescape: Torment still considered one of the best (C)RPG stories by many when writers had almost 25 years to surpass it?
Yeah, if you pick a random game from the 90s and a random game from today, then the latter will perhaps be more playable. Many old games have plenty of jank that wouln't fly today. Because today's games are designed for just that: so that anyone with half a braincell can complete them. That means ecessive hints. It means refusal to provide challenges that might limit your market. It means limiting the amount of text because everything needs to be voiced which costs a lot. It means repeating mechanics that "work" instead of daring to try something unique.
> I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
Yet people still listen to classical music and everything in between then and now. Some even mainting their own collection. Are you really going to say that for every Mozart or The Beetles or Black Sabbath or whatever there is a 2020s group that pulls of the concepts better? Does the warm fuzzy sound from old analog recordings prevent you from enjoying them as much as older graphics do?
Of course the answer to what is better also depends a lot of taste. Just like with music, the predominant styles of games shifts over time.
Off-topic, but I see this strange pattern on HN a lot: You say it's hard to disagree with something, then you spend paragraphs disagreeing. What is hard disagree? Why not just say I strongly disagree?
I never played HL originally so I had no nostalgia from it, but when I tried it a few years ago it just felt very dated. Sure, the mechanics and story probably hold up. But the visuals, ui, modern niceties, etc are all absent. Just doesn’t seem worth playing when you could pick up a newer similar game instead.
HN is always telling us to be outraged when an online game is shut down, but by the time they get shut down, hardly anyone cares about playing them anyway, they moved on to newer stuff.
Cyberpunk is related because at launch it was shoving crapware out the door. It actually worked mostly fine on my PC, so its not a personal thing. I love the game.
It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time.
I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.
My Cyberpunk experience was actually quite good. I didn't try it on day 1, but after a patch or two my pirated copy (wanted to see if my PC could run it before I spent 60 euros on it) ran great. Sure, my poor 1080 can't do max settings or ray tracing or even good DLSS, but the graphics are gorgeous even at mid-low settings. There were (and still are) Skyrim-level bugs, but that didn't bother me too much.
I think the people that bought into the hype got severely disappointed and anyone buying the game on consoles simply got scammed, but as someone who bought the game after it had been out for a bit, I've had nothing but fun with it.
In fact, one thing CP2077 allows that most other games don't, is backing up the DRM-free installer for the patched game. Steam/PS store/Xbox Online will die one day and all their online patches will disappear forerver, but the GOG versions of most games will run in 20 or 30 years as long as you remember make a backup of the installer.
Good to know. There's a big fat warning that you forfeit your right to return the game as soon as you click download.
This is in France, where there's a mandatory 14-day return window for online purchases. But there are restrictions on some items, such as media must be "unopened", and I guess downloading is considered as "opening".
Greed being the common denominator makes it not the culprit. If greed were truly the culprit then they would be focused on making the most amount of money possible without constraints.
I tried Battlefield 2042 and it was really cool to see such large open fighting spaces, but they're also so large they're boring. People are so spread out a large portion of the time can be spent playing just finding an enemy to shoot at...
By comparison Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clear the best Battlefield game of all time. And the graphics to this day still hold up.
My problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it doesn’t feel like battlefield. It feels like some exec asked “what kind of shooters have gotten popular with the kids recently? Let’s rip those off”.
> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer.
It's infinitely expensive, because older games compete with new ones(not everyone cares for looks and there are mods that can make this argument obsolete). And new ones don't always win. Especially with introduction of game as a service. There are many tactics used by modern developers to squeeze more money from players, that modern gamers don't like. And if gamers had a choice many would go retro. This is why WoW Classic exists. This is why emulation exist. This is why people develop open engines for old games. And this is why it is in developers best interest to prevent their older games from competing with new ones. Especially if people were to learn that they could get free skins for their games in past, while modern ones demand cash for even basic palette swap.
Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.
The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042.
5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart.
Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.
Companies have been aware of the reputation gains for over a decade now. Modern Warfare 2 got tons of backlash when it released without a server browser in 2009. The next CoD, Black Ops 1, had support for dedicated servers. So did Modern Warfare 3.
> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer.
That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death.
Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.
Recently on a whim I downloaded HL2 and logged into the deathmatch lobby. There are still self hosted servers active with dozens of players duking it out.
I joined in the fun, and for an hour I felt like I was 15 again, it's held up surprisingly well! If epic ever turns off the Fortnite server, it's just gone.
Wolfenstein:ET had and has a non-stop and alive playerbase and mapping scene. There are multiple communities hosting their modified Wolfenstein:ET version and making sure the different communities are reachable through one unified server browser.
> One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones
Not just games, it's really.. everything.
I predict that a 100 years from now the collectors of old things of any kind will have a lot more from prior to 2000-2020 (depending on the item) than anything newer. Whether it is computers, electronics, games, cars, doesn't matter.
All of them are becoming so dependent on third-party cloud services and phone apps that simply won't exist and will be impossible to recreate in a century. All that will survive is the older generation of products that did not depend on anything. Very sad.
> For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary).
You make it sound like a good thing. And it indeed is for gamers. But it's the worse nightmare for established dev/pub that people play the old games, on their own servers, instead of your latest title.
It actually happened quite a lot. Starcraft I was (is?) more popular than Starcraft II in Korea, where the biggest Starcraft E-sport scenes are. I recently learned that Red Alert II is still fairly popular today in China, and Red Alert III players don't exist.
"How to out compete our previous title" is a real problem that established studios face. The lack of durability is a "solution".
I'm glad we didn't have to worry about Mozart or Beethoven trying to bury their previous works so that they wouldn't have to compete with their previous titles. This seems like a perverse incentive unique to modern creative works.
Well without modern technology, you need a well-trained orchestra to replicate Symphone No.9. The marginal cost was a totally different beast at that time.
Well, you have to make a better title then. If people prefer Red Alert 2 to Red Alert 3, then it's not like Red Alert 3 somehow deserves or is entitled to any money or attention; it has to earn it by being a better, desirable product - and from the opposite side, the players are entitled to keep playing the older game forever, they paid for it fair and square.
Indeed. It's a form of DRM if we take the R to mean 'restrictions', whether it's intentional or not. It just goes to show that all these publishers have no interest in making great games, but to simply milk players for a little while before moving on to the next thing. That and the loot boxes are the main reason I don't buy "modern" games anymore. I stash all my cash for GOG.
Specifically, matchmaking shutting down isn't too bad as long as hosting and Direct Connect still work :
plenty of games that have lost their matchmaking by GameSpy shutting down have found a second MP life through third-party matchmaking services like Game Ranger.
But do NOT buy games where MP doesn't work at all without official servers (or only through Steam MP or equivalent).
Community servers are also great. You get to meet people and develop relationships with them as you play. Matchmaking just dumps you with a bunch of randos, half of which are going to be angry teens.
Its never been easier to host a game server than it is today. We had to cohost and ship servers 20 years ago. There were some game hosting companies but they were usually bad performance for the price. Nowadays you can spin up a VM with a moments notice for a lot less money and investment and yet we are in the age of games not coming with dedicated server software.
you're speaking of multiplayer games, which is true, but even single-player games will face this when they have denuvo, once the denuvo server goes out you're also unable to play your single player games.
But modern games that rely on matchmaking through the developer/publisher? Forget it, when they go down, there's no saving them, alas.
So really this is a pretty clear-cut case of functionality deteriorating because the maker of the game has way more power than before to change the game _after_ the customer bought it (the recent brouhaha where BMW or whoever offered a subscription to boost your car's top speed by unlocking a speed lock in software also comes to mind, not to mention "purchased" streaming-only movies disappearing forever once the streaming service dies, etc.).