this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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What's wrong with live service games? Soulless AAA games tend to be live service, but so are good games. All of MMO's are a live service and many are good games (if MMO's are your thing).
All of live service games are designed to disappear once they stop making money, which is a nightmare for preservation that doesn't have to be that way. Also, their incentives are to keep you playing for longer, which is not the same as making sure you have a good time. If you find a player base absolutely angry at the developer behind a game they play, it's going to be live service, because of these incentives.
For real.
One of my favorites was Marvel Heroes. One day it was just gone forever.
Or they don't disappear, servers are released or reverse engineered and the community takes over. Yeah, in many cases it doesn't happen and companies often try to prevent that, but then that's the shitty thing. The fact the game was live service didn't prevent preservation in itself or require the developer to make a bad game. It often goes together, yes, but it's not an inherent property of it.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of dead live service games have had pirate or reverse engineered servers come in to save the day, but my gut feeling is that it's a very, very low number.
what would you day a good live service game is?
I got slowly beaten out of Destiny by their live service model.
I play Hearthstone, but I've had a full collection for 4+ years now and I recognize spending ~$300/year on a single game isn't for everyone, I also recognize in 5 or 6 years they'll close the game down and nothing will remain, and then in 20 or so years even websites and YouTube videos mentioning it will become scarse.
The same is not true for games like Mario 64, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, even Tetris.
Any multiplayer game will die once its community moves on. Whether it's live service or not and one could argue live service helps prolong a game's time in the spotlight.
007 Agent Under Fire came out in 2001, and you can still play it in multiplayer as long as you have a single friend handy. Same goes for Quake, even older. Live service games offer you no way to play them once their servers are turned off.
I see lots of MMOs that become ran by the community on private servers after the developer stops supporting it. It's crap when companies try to stop that, but the game being a live service isn't a problem in itself.
Not servers offered by the developers/publishers (as far as I know, with the one exception of Knockout City), which makes it an unreliable option at best. You can't exactly spin up a private server for Rumbleverse.
I'm still playing Unreal Tournament 2004 just fine with bots. I don't need a community to play Project Zomboid with my SO. Your claim is factually incorrect.
Ok, playing ut2004 with bots surely replicates the original experience...
It replicates it well enough for me to still be playing it regularly 20 years later and well enough to debunk the myth that every multiplayer game must automatically become unplayable with time ("die") solely due to the fact that it's multiplayer.
I can also still play UT2K4 with my friends, should I want to. I can't do either of these with a "live service" game where there is no offline mode or self-hostable servers.
Also, you ignored my mention of PZ, which is a multiplayer-enabled game which also won't die when the developer dies (or abandons the game).
Elite: Dangerous is all right. Buy once, no subscription or other crap, really cool in VR. Or World of Warcraft (I played it over 10 years ago, so not sure about now), had a really good time, don't remember any bullshit from the devs.
WoW itself is probably decent but "Blizzard" and "bullshit" are kinda synonymous for many reasons- although the majority are not in-game reasons.
Blizzard today just has nothing to do with Blizzard back in the day
Somewhat agree but I'd argue "today" is relevant to "live service"
Yeah, my point boils down to "nowadays live service games tend to contain lots of antifeatures and bullshit practices", but the concept of a live service game is not inherently bad.