I like how splitgate devs turned the game peer to peer after they shut down the official servers. It’s really unfortunate we have to hope for them to do the right thing instead of it being an industry standard
Thankfully there are still some games that have custom server support, but they’re mostly in the open source space.
I really agree that, with the way gaming has gone, custom servers are going to be a necessity. The only problem is that people generally like the consistency and usability of match-making services which would also need to be open sourced, but I think there are probably clever ways to design around this (for example, servers belong to tags and users have to opt-in and opt-out of tags, and game master server lists are responsible for administering these tags.)
I actually am really sick of TF2 gameplay, which isn’t to hate on TF2. Payload is one of the tightest most satisfying team objective gametypes I have played in a shooter. I have just played a metric fuckton of TF2 over the years and I typically want something different these days.
I still play TF2 occasionally though because of how fun it is to poke around on the server browser and see the kind of weird shit people are up to in TF2. That is what a server browser does, it gives a game a sense of place and it gives multiplayer a sense of fun exploration (ooh this server looks weird let me try it!).
From Software patched the original Dark Souls PC port to remove Games For Windows Live when that service shut down, replaced it with steam networking. This was years and years before the remaster, so they weren’t making money on it - they just up and fixed it. MMOs? A bunch of unpaid modders brought up the first WoW custom servers, and some of those were reverse engineered.
Your argument doesn’t pass the “just look and see if it’s true” test.
WTF are you talking about? Every multiplayer PC game had that when I was growing up; it was just the normal way multiplayer worked. One player hosts a game and the other players type in their IP address and join it. Server browsers using external infrastructure (whether third-party, like GameSpy, or first-party, like Battle.net) didn’t come until later, and even then, they were just matchmaking services and the game server itself was still run by you.
Restricting multiplayer to only servers run by the publisher is the abnormal, fucked-up thing!
This sort of shit is why we shouldn’t have accepted it when games stopped coming with the ability to run your own server.
I like how splitgate devs turned the game peer to peer after they shut down the official servers. It’s really unfortunate we have to hope for them to do the right thing instead of it being an industry standard
Thankfully there are still some games that have custom server support, but they’re mostly in the open source space.
I really agree that, with the way gaming has gone, custom servers are going to be a necessity. The only problem is that people generally like the consistency and usability of match-making services which would also need to be open sourced, but I think there are probably clever ways to design around this (for example, servers belong to tags and users have to opt-in and opt-out of tags, and game master server lists are responsible for administering these tags.)
You can have both, like TF2. Their server browser is kinda janky like most other source games but it’s there and it works
I actually am really sick of TF2 gameplay, which isn’t to hate on TF2. Payload is one of the tightest most satisfying team objective gametypes I have played in a shooter. I have just played a metric fuckton of TF2 over the years and I typically want something different these days.
I still play TF2 occasionally though because of how fun it is to poke around on the server browser and see the kind of weird shit people are up to in TF2. That is what a server browser does, it gives a game a sense of place and it gives multiplayer a sense of fun exploration (ooh this server looks weird let me try it!).
Only a handful of games ever had that capability. And most all games that were MMO were never designed for that.
From Software patched the original Dark Souls PC port to remove Games For Windows Live when that service shut down, replaced it with steam networking. This was years and years before the remaster, so they weren’t making money on it - they just up and fixed it. MMOs? A bunch of unpaid modders brought up the first WoW custom servers, and some of those were reverse engineered.
Your argument doesn’t pass the “just look and see if it’s true” test.
WTF are you talking about? Every multiplayer PC game had that when I was growing up; it was just the normal way multiplayer worked. One player hosts a game and the other players type in their IP address and join it. Server browsers using external infrastructure (whether third-party, like GameSpy, or first-party, like Battle.net) didn’t come until later, and even then, they were just matchmaking services and the game server itself was still run by you.
Restricting multiplayer to only servers run by the publisher is the abnormal, fucked-up thing!