Many of us only view a game’s release in passing, and view it as an “event”. Groundhog Smasher came out, it failed, and we don’t hear of it again. Additionally, many of us associate “online” games with being “live service” - expecting the developers to announce a new skin, battle pass, game mechanic, or character every other week.
But some online games are just purely enjoyable, or get enough unremarkable patches, or sometimes don’t even need a high playercount, to be enjoyed for years after the developers stopped emitting news.
This subject also gets confusing with cross-play games; even if one game has hardly anyone in its Steam playercount, sometimes between Playstation and Xbox there’s just enough left to garner a following.
Which games do you play, or know about, that most people would’ve thought to be completely closed down, or at least had totally forgotten about?
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Titanfall 2 servers were brought back online after being down for awhile.
I still play Starcraft 2 occasionally.
Metriod Prime: Hunters.
It was the best FPS, arguably the only FPS, on the Nintendo DS. Nintendo has long since shut down their online service for the DS. However, if you go into your WiFi settings you can change your DNS to point to a server that spoofs Nintendo’s credentials.
Thanks to this exploit you can play all the original DS games online with a legitimate game, on a legitimate console. There’s even a discord for MP:H with a matchmaking channel, clans, and regular tournaments. (The same probably goes for Mario Kart DS)
How many are insta kill “deathalt” cheaters…?
TBH, I haven’t played online yet. But I get tagged with the matchrequest ping once or twice a day.
hold up link me the discord, I played the absolute fuck out of this game as a kid. literally built a whole community by shooting friend codes on a wall to add people I’d match against LMAO
Welcome, friend. https://discord.gg/AeAECPN
Back 4 Blood was the game that served as the idea for this post.
I recently felt like picking up some cheap copies of it to play with a few friends, and decided to launch it once ahead of time just to test it out and see how it ran. I picked “Online” mode out of habit, feeling it would likely search for a bit before handing me 3 bots to play singleplayer. Instead, I actually got a decent group of people together several days in a row.
In B4B’s case, while the developers visibly “abandoned” the game in news headlines, the form it exists in is very playable and generally bug-free, even if its ultra-highest-difficulty “endgame” allegedly lacks some refinement. It got a lot of outlash for not matching the playstyle of Left 4 Dead; having players use a deep system of roguelike-style upgrades. Since the enemies escalate in difficulty, those upgrades are often necessary and can connect with team strategy. It’s now on PS+, and since it’s crossplay, Steam players will get a lot of queue buddies. It’s also playable with just 2 people since the other 2 characters will just be bots.
I gave up on B4B pretty quickly because after your team dies a couple times you’re sent back to the beginning of the campaign, instead of the beginning of the level, like in L4D. Then everyone just drops out of frustration. Made trying the harder difficulties pointless. Was a really bad design decision.
My buddy still regularly plays EverQuest Online. These days, it’s sort of expected that you multibox and run an entire party, instead of just one character. He usually has his bots pulling mobs in the background of whatever other game we happen to be playing.
I haven’t played for years now but NeoTokyo still has an active community.
Post Scriptum (now known as Squad 44) is still alive. A very under-appreciated game and they are trying to revive it with a new dev team who have been doing wonders but the active player count is still well below 1k.
I haven’t played in a number of years, but I’m pretty sure fan-made servers are still running for Phantasy Star Online.
I was playing the GameCube version online well over a decade after that console was dead. Blue Burst on PC is well supported too, I believe.
Crazy now to imagine a console game letting you input a DNS server and IP address for online play. But it did.
Ultima IV -
Guild Wars 1 - last month celebrated its 20-years anniversary :) I only started it in 2018, but it’s a really solid game!
And both its developer and publisher are committed to keeping it alive as long as they can. It’s been mostly automated in 2013, so apparently it costs very little to keep the servers running.
Call of Duty: United Offensive on PC. I just recently came back after a decade of not playing (and over 20 years after release) and the community is still there just smaller and the game is still just as fun
Istaria, previously known as Horizons. Still the only MMORPG (to my knowledge) with dragons as a playable race.
There’s a number of mud games still around in their text glory. Love me a text mmo. Well most aren’t massive. None are massive. Hence mud, multi user dungeon. But not massively multi user.
I currently play Starmourn which is very new by mud standards.
Wish my mud was still running. So good (if you are me…)
APB Reloaded. Just looked at ths 2 days ago and 200 people were playing. This was the GTA online before GTA online. They blew their load and spend the budget on the character creator and nothing else
I thought “that game had such a tumultuous development cycle and launch surly it’s dead now right?” Wrong
Last I checked, Populous the beginning still has a small community going on Popre!
