Y|yukichigai

And wow! I totally thought those servers went down. I would have bet money that I remember reading about it.

EverQuest’s servers were slated to go down at least once, but that was when the then-current now-former owners no longer wanted the IP and were trying to sell it. It was less “we are taking them down” and more “we don’t want to spend anymore money keeping these up, but if someone else wants to we’ll sell for a good price.” Someone bought them and the servers stayed up. The game still makes money apparently.

EverQuest is still going. So is Ultima Online. My wife’s EQ account from launch is still there with all her characters and goodies. As for the others, people were upset when those were shut down. People definitely weren’t “totally fine” with that.

There’s another aspect though, in that with MMOs you are paying monthly for a service, and an actual quantifiable one. The servers that run those MMOs (current ones anyway) aren’t light pieces of computer equipment that you could easily run in your home. It’s like going to a bar with a cover charge: you could talk to people at home or drink at home, but you’re paying for doing that at a place with some neat decorations and a lot more people than you’re likely to meet at your home.

Expanding that metaphor, singleplayer games are you drinking at home. People do not want to give the liquor store the right to come into your liquor cabinet and take back the booze if they decide you no longer should have it.

Because of the second “M” in the term, i.e. “Multiplayer”. MMOs are as much about the community as the game. For some they’re more important than the game. MMOs generally only get shut down when almost all of the community has left… or in other words when a lot of the game’s “content” is no longer available anyway.

That’s not the case for singleplayer games, or games designed for local/couch multiplayer. There’s no natural limit on the game being playable. For PS2/Xbox era stuff and before, as long as you have game and the hardware you can fire it up today and have the same experience (not counting your worsening reflexes). There’s no justifiable reason why a company should be allowed to decide that you can no longer play the game you bought on hardware you physically possess. The only reason is greed, pure and simple. That’s why people aren’t okay with it.

AI upscale slop is this generation’s Comic Sans.

The beta launcher has a bunch of features disabled/absent compared to the main launcher, not the least being the shopping cart. Not surprising that it would load faster when it has less to do.

Doesn’t sound like they’re going to backport this unfortunately. Damn shame: I absolutely love The Division but having it on Steam means I have to run two launchers to play it. It usually works… usually.