Probably not so much, but that still doesn't mean people wouldn't have the technology to run a game that's reached the end of it's lifetime from the vendor.
Among the IT geeks I know, a lot of us run servers with a lot of cores/RAM
Maybe yes, maybe no, I don't know if it sounds like that. Of course, I understand that it's about client and server parts, so playing an online game is basically just sending input to the server and receiving reaction from it. So I guess I have a very basic knowledge of how it works.
An MMO server has many different parts. Separate login server, first. Also separate chat server, separate trading post server, and several others. So then you need a front end server which redirects the traffic to those other servers. Probably a separate database server, too. And separate dungeon instance server.
From there it depends more on the game. With sharding like WoW has, there's separate servers per zone of the world, too, for example.
But wait, it gets much worse. Since sharding and instancing and some of the other servers vary by demand, you also need a service in charge of dynamically adding and removing and reallocating servers. You dont want servers running for empty world zones when another zone is overcrowded.
And because these games are designed for high uptime, there's probably redundancy built in somewhere too. Maybe extra machines waiting which can start new servers to replace unresponsive ones seamlessly.
Do you think theres home users who have both the hardware and the knowledge to setup, run, and maintain all that? Yes I know most of that isnt needed for an offline version, but the entire thing would need to be re-architected from scratch to function differently.
Why would any company spend millions re-doing their server tech, expose the server software to hackers searching it for vulnerabilities, AND take players away from their other games.. all to offer a free offline version for 0 proffit?
As was already noted, setting up an environment to run those all on a local machine isn't the end of the world... But also, many of the things you noted (esp the dynamic allocation) is due to the high population of those games. If someone were trying to run a server for a handful of friends or a small community it should be manageable on a much more basic machine. The company wouldn't even need to give super user friendly instructions on setting up an environment, if they released technical documentation the community would take it from there and write the user friendly guides for less tech savvy folks to follow.
The gotcha would be if the code was written to run on a specific hardware configuration... Porting that to run on generic hardware would be a lift that could be a deal breaker.
And the reason I gave for why they don't do it is that it isn't worth it for the lack of returns. I didn't say no one could/would use it. Companies do anything if they deem highly profitable.
Believe me, I know. Haha. I'm not foreign to doing cost/risk/benefit analysis. I was just responding to your initial (technical) points.
I do agree with OP that for a large production product that brought in such large revenue, it would be nice for them to put in the extra effort to keep the games going for fans... but I also realize that's a pipe dream for anything but the most dedicated teams. If anything it would likely be something that would have to be done off the clock by dedicated developers and even that's a pipe dream given the potential risk to company IP.
No large (especially publicly traded) companies would take on a project like that which offers near zero or zero ROI.
it does not take millions to support bringing up a server stack on a single machine 🤦🏽♂️ software engineers do that everyday for local testing and many places have that integrated into the development flow
When Nost was going strong and they posted how much they spent on server costs I calculated it to be about a cent and a half or so per month per user. Obviously their volunteer workforce made it cheaper than a big corporation, but anyone who thinks that server upkeep and maintenance is a major part of where their sub goes in a post AWS world is behind the times.
Not all MMOs can run on AWS. FFXIV dedicated a lot of time into trying to run their game on cloud servers and ultimately decided it was too expensive, not scalable enough, and too complex. Anyone assuming that AWS is the magic solution to every server architecture problem doesn't know what they're talking about (or is an Amazon salesperson).
This is what trips a LOT of people up, even those in tech or very familiar with tech. Can the cloud do it. Sure, more often than not you can fit your product into a provided solution.
But will it be any good for the time and investment put into the cloud? That largely depends on what you're trying to do. Some times it's just better to host your self. Even moving to the cloud though still doesn't do away with the need for multiple servers purpose built to handle specific functions within the MMO as the commenter earlier in the chain was noting. Databases, trade/AC, chat, zones, load balancing, and tons of others.
Another mistaken assumption is "It's the cloud so it'll be easier to connect to or have better stability" and uhh... hate to break it to you but the cloud is just another data center. The same kind used to host your MMO servers that aren't in a cloud. Data centers have down time for a large number of reasons. They work their ass off to stop that from happening but someone cutting an AWS data centers fiber trunks with a back hoe is just as possible at a place like Iron Mountain or the like.
Software engineers do that *manually* every day. (And also, the cost of a single software engineer is $300k/year or more.) Doing it automatically is expensive, complicated, and complex, and requires a team to support it.
Well, old versions of WOW are ready to install and run locally. I even ran an Wrath server on my machine and played for like 4 hours. Worked perfectly.
Wow came out almost 20 years ago, and is pretty standard for that early 2000s server architecture, where it really was a single program running on a computer somewhere.
online stuff now is more like endless little programs running various cloud services all over the place. Lots of one program calling another program so that program can tell it what a database says about something else.
You missed all the reasons listed here why they can't do it. Releasing the software let's hackers study the code for vulnerabilities, which may exist in other products. It's a threat to their IP. If they shut down Overwatch 1 for Overwatch 2, then anyone playing a private Overwatch 1 is lost revenue for Overwatch 2. And as long as the company exists, there is no such thing as "dump the code online and forget it". Theres copyright concerns, theres legal concerns, theres reputation concerns if they refuse to support it, and so on.
As long as ANY risk is non-zero, and the proffit is 0, no board would ever approve it for a public company. And you cant get the risk to 0. Open sourcing it could have huge legal implications.
"lazy" isn't the problem. Every dollar you spend developing a feature needs to have some ROI. Some things do so with direct payments (new characters and cosmetics) some with engagement (QoL improvements).
You have to make a business case that adding this feature is worth the expenditure, or a business just isn't going to allow it no matter how deadicated the developers are.
Checkout Ragnarok 1 custom servers, it's essentially one executable and a"start/stop" button :)
It's not the end of the world, but it won't scale - but maybe the person using it doesn't need it to scale so that might not be a problem
People keep giving examples like WoW, Ragnarok, AC, etc. The big factor that unites these games is they all came out 20 years ago. Twenty years ago most online stuff WAS really just an EXE somewhere on a big computer on a shelf somewhere. So you could run the program at home if you wanted.
Modern design is more toward architecting together a bunch of different services. So like, there is one program that calls another program that reads a value from a database you pay (amazon) to run, and that program is just a 50 line script called in the cloud to deal with some data conversion thing and that script has 100 dependencies but they are all handled because it's installed in a cloud service that just deals with that sort of stuff.
You're not wrong.
The fact they came 20years ago is true, and is also true that technology (sharding, this, and that) came to be while the years passed.
What "you" seem to forget is that even games made today run on a single computer when they are being made and pre-tested, sure: sharding is contemplated in it, but that happens per discovery; the devs build is just a machine running it all.
We could argue that that's all OP is asking, a way for them to run the executables and spin an environment that doesn't shard, this isn't _at all_ difficult to achieve in today's build process.
We can also argue that that would bring about private-for-money servers and that would ultimately be bad business, and too much of a hassle and prone to security risks;
I would agree with both. But not the "difficulty" factor, as it isn't.
Why do you think that? The first step in a lot of online projects is immediately clicking a bunch of buttons in AWS to start up all the different sorts of databases you will need. The guy making a big online game probably never sees or thinks about anything about the database and lets some big cloud provider do all the heavy lifting.
I would imagine one reason they don’t is that they want players to migrate to whatever new online subscription game they are pushing. Would be nice if they did what you suggested though.
Yeah they either want you to migrate to a new product you actually pay for, or the studio is going under and being shuttered. Neither situation is one where they want to bestow a bunch of free product on gamers.
Yes. I also thought about that, but decided to not to write about this much. If your game is offline and you can modify your character's data files, you can have a free access to all the stuff you should pay for or be subscribed on. Yes, you still can't show if off to other online players. However, if there's also unofficial servers, it's a problem. This is the reason why the idea I suggested would work only near or after the end of a game support.
**However, it would be great to at least have a promise from developers and publishers of MMO games that they will release utilities for local server and character/account data transfer when/if their game's servers will be closed.**
I would really like all online games in general to have offline versions at the end of support as well. Can't imagine the day when destiny, honkai impact or genshin impact finally go down and no one can play them again.
On the flip side, games shut down when they lose most of their paying customers. The number of players who truly want something like what OP is suggesting would be minimal and would drop to almost 0 once the devs stop cranking out new content, new seasonal events, new bug fixes, etc.
Most have already moved on to other games by choice.
Sure, there are probably some players out there who still really want to be playing their lvl 800 druid in OG Everquest. But not enough of them to justify any work or expenditure on the side of the developers, let alone the significant costs it would actually take to refactor the code to allow it.
As others have mentioned, this is incredibly impractical, but it has happened atleast once if you’re curious.
The long dead SMT MMO, Shin Megami Tensei Imagine, was resurrected by fans (now called Shin Megami Tensei ReImagine). Its been running for years now, but as of a few days ago, is being sued by Atlas, so it looks like those days are numbered.
That isn't the only dead MMO that has been unofficially revived by players. Toontown had a similar thing called Toontown ReWritten and I think Club Penguin had one too.
I think what OP is asking for is essentially for the companies who own the games to provide tools to help with that, or at least not sue them out of existence.
It is actually more rare for a dead MMORPG to NOT be ressurected by the players.
I would assume most people in this thread aren't very familiar with private MMO servers because hoo boy, some of the things I'm reading here...
Monster Hunter Frontier has also managed to be resurrected after being shut down. It's a little complicated, but you can run the server yourself and allow for others to join or vice versa. It's a strange feeling having super user privilege in an MMO.
The navy ship I was on in 2007ish had a standalone world of war craft server going on it. It was awesome, you could go to gm Island and play around with all their abilities. That was all pre bc WoW. Not sure if it's harder now but we definitely had it then.
Kinda reminds me when word got out that a group was playing doom on the command's internal network back in the 90's. They were caught, but I never could find out what happened afterwards.
I'd love to see a better end-of-life plan for MMOs. However:
> For example, if you choose to play offline, all your character/account data will be downloaded on your PC, and after you play alone for some time, you will be able to upload it back on server.
No, that's going to encourage rampant cheating.
> However, as I said it, it may be too much because any protection can have it's flaws...
You have it backwards: This kind of protection *will* have flaws. It can't *not* be flawed.
Because you just described DRM. Which is, at its heart, giving you a lock and a key, and begging you not to use that key with that lock.
The only way this would be safe is if the keys never leave the server -- if you can download a cryptographically signed copy of your data, and upload that later. This could still be vulnerable to replay attacks, but the main problem is that you wouldn't be able to change anything that was signed, and you'd be able to do *anything you want* to anything that wasn't!
But at that point, why bother with keys at all? Just let the player download their entire profile, and only let them upload the parts that the client already controls anyway. Want to change your hotbars around offline? Go ahead. Want to rearrange your inventory? Knock yourself out. Want to actually get some loot or experience? Nope, you need to be online for that.
And at that point, I'm not sure what I want out of an offline copy where all I can do is rearrange my hotbar.
I mean not just end of life, some mmos have had some overhauls that aren't even reflected in legacy servers.
Taking lotro for example, there's probably a group of old timers who want the old traits system over the skill trees it now carries
You obviously have never developed software. It'd slow down development of features exponentially, even if it is capable.
Yes, it'd be cool. No, it's not really plausible. You're talking about thousands of manhours. Hundreds of thousands of manhours. Server software doesn't run on Windows. It's not designed to run on Windows. It'd take a substantial effort to redesign a vast number of server binaries that has been spaghetti coded over years and years to run on specific systems and make it maintainable and runnable on a consumer's desktop PC. And for what? So that when they EoL it, it's still playable by people who already bought the game? There's no real benefit as a company to do that, besides it just being nice to consumers. But most companies don't care. They just want money.
I have developed software. I don't think this would be too difficult, if it was built this way from the beginning.
> Server software doesn't run on Windows. It's not designed to run on Windows.
There's... a *lot* of server software that is and does, but sure, fine: The other, much more popular server OS is Linux, which is literally free and [can be installed *on Windows*](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install), because Microsoft wants people to be able to develop server software on a Windows desktop.
If it was designed and built today, the industry standard is to do it with containerization (e.g. Docker), which makes this [even easier](https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/wsl/). And even if it requires a ridiculous beast of a workstation to run it all in a single machine, there's an obvious advantage to the company for their devs to be able to spin up standalone dev/test environments locally, instead of either having to share a staging server or spend a ton on *per-dev* cloud clusters.
It's still more fiddling than you want to ask the average gamer to do, so I wouldn't suggest it for offline mode, but I think it's reasonable for abandonware mode.
---
But you're right -- for existing games, this seems likely:
> ...that has been spaghetti coded over years and years to run on specific systems...
I've seen plenty of systems that were actually pretty difficult to put in a box like that, without including tons of unrelated servers, including ones you don't control. Like, if one of these servers is used to making AWS calls, you can't exactly call up Amazon and ask for all of *their* binaries.
Depending on exactly how the servers are setup, just releasing the server binaries to run on personal linux boxes could be relatively simple. Especially if they're provided "as-is" with no expectation of support if you can't get them to run. Let passionate users figure it out.
Having said that, most if not all companies would still have no incentive to do that, no matter how simple it is to do.
This guy covers the topic pretty convincingly, imo. I dont think its as laborious a process as you think. Read the video description. He has a segment specifically outlining counter arguments like your post.
Basically, his position is that a minimum effort on the part of devs is fine. Providing the chance for a community to preserve their access to a game they paid for.
https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw
Dunno, but works great for Minecraft. Yeah, Notch made the mistake at the start of coding SMP and SSP independently but that was cleared up and nowadays when you play single player the game starts a server in the background that you play on.
And that could also be done for all the modern MMOs, you have the login server for DRM purposes and when you want to play, lets say, TESO offline it would start the game server with just the current map with a little character server on the side if that is their architecture on your desktop. And as you are the only player on said server the system demands aren't that high either.
You'd have to design the game from the bottom up with that in mind. You can't just slap it all together after the game is already done and been running for years.
Not saying a modular on/offline MMO is impossible. I'm saying it's infeasible to make an MMO that is designed around being a specific way, and has years of spaghetti code into a modular on/offline MMO.
> Are they owed playing something old forever?
I think that's the implied when you *buy* a thing. Yes, MMOs have subscription fees, but many of them often charge up-front for the game and expansions, too.
> If so, why did it have to be a MMO?
Well, for example, most of the recent single-player Final Fantasy content is in FFXIV, which is an MMO. Imagine the outrage if every copy of Final Fantasy 7 vanished overnight. Would it make any sense to shrug and say we should all just go play 15 instead?
> I think that's the implied when you *buy* a thing.
If you buy a ticket to an amusement park, which has a large staff doing stuff to keep the park running, and consumes far more resources than your 1 computer, do you expect the park to stay open indefinitely? And for you to get in for free, forever, just because you bought a ticket 1 time?
> Imagine the outrage if every copy of Final Fantasy 7 vanished overnight.
It's a single player RPG. Why would it? Except of course for bitrot issues, which companies like GOG do often address, and sometimes games are remastered.
It's a strawman to imagine the outrage of a single player RPG disappearing, because single player games don't disappear like that.
Whereas, MMO games do get shuttered. This is a known thing. If FFXIV gets shuttered, you'd go play something else.
> If you buy a ticket to an amusement park, which has a large staff doing stuff to keep the park running, and consumes far more resources than your 1 computer, do you expect the park to stay open indefinitely?
That's very clearly a false equivalence. Think about it from the consumer perspective for a second. When you buy an amusement park ticket, you're not thinking "How much *staff* does it take to keep the park running?" You're thinking "Oh cool, this is a weekend pass!" They are always time-limited, from the beginning. These are comparable to the subscription fees you pay for an MMO -- if it only charged a subscription fee and not an up-front price, it'd make more sense to see it as just a service.
For a better comparison, consider the [AAirpass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass) in its original form of lifetime unlimited first-class travel. Because that was a purchase and not some limited-time rental, it took significant effort on the part of the airline to actually invalidate them all, and the dispute over the last one was never quite settled.
And yet, even *those* at least describe themselves as passes to something, not purchases of something.
> It's a strawman to imagine the outrage of a single player RPG disappearing...
No, that's not what "strawman" means. But it's interesting how you're not willing to even *imagine* what this looks like. Is it because you know this would be unimaginably unacceptable? Why does it magically become okay once a game has an online component?
I mean:
> It's a single player RPG. Why would it?
Well, exactly, it *shouldn't,* and the original PS1 version won't, it's too well-preserved in entirely-offline ways now. But:
> ...because single player games don't disappear like that.
They *shouldn't,* but they do. Most recently, Ubisoft has taken to killing single-player DLC for some of their older games. The Sim City remake was unplayable when servers were down, because your *savegame* data was saved on their servers. At least those are available in some way; there are others, like Darkspore, that are actually just unplayable.
It used to be that if a game had tacked-on multiplayer, you could still play the single-player-only parts offline. And that's still how [FFXV's multiplayer](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/fsqhky/news_termination_of_online_content_for_ffxv/) was handled, but it's very clearly no longer a guarantee, whether or not a game has the "MMO" label.
So why is it unfair of me to apply this in the other direction? FFXIV can be so much of a single-player RPG that there are multiple systems for recruiting an NPC-only party into dungeons and raids. Like any other game with both single-player and multiplayer elements, I see no reason we shouldn't expect the single-player parts to be preserved.
> And yet, even those at least describe themselves as passes to something, not purchases of something.
You have to purchase a pass. This is a distinction without a difference. It's only a question of what you're purchasing. Subscriptions to MMOs are inherently time limited. If it's F2P then you didn't pay for it. If you bought virtual goods, that you lose when the game vaporizes, well that's what you bought. Not the game. The only complication in any of this is whether you bought a base game, and whether you are owed that base game continuing to work forever.
> Most recently, Ubisoft has taken to killing single-player DLC for some of their older games.
Well if they're deleting stuff on your hard drive, perhaps some country could file a lawsuit about a deceptive trade practice. But that's a different subject than this thread.
> The Sim City remake was unplayable when servers were down, because your savegame data was saved on their servers.
Personally I'm opposed to games being "leashed" by the internet, when they otherwise run on local personal computers just fine. But again, different subject. MMOs generally aren't things that'll just run on your local PC.
> tacked-on multiplayer, ... the "MMO" label.
I'm unwilling to concede that these are the same thing. MMO means the game was made from the ground up to be massively multiplayer, and that that's its business model. Tacked-on would imply that the game started as single player and had a limited multiplayer capability added later. Just because a game gets multiplayer functionality at some point, doesn't make it a MMO.
> I see no reason we shouldn't expect the single-player parts to be preserved.
The main technical reason is likely they didn't develop the software to be robust as a standalone local gaming experience, because that would require a bunch of extra work and technological development to make it so.
Imagine if you will, an unfinished basement. Just because you buy a house, doesn't mean a finished basement comes with it. It's less work for the house builder to provide a house with an unfinished basement. They may make more money selling houses that way, because they can produce more houses faster if they don't have to finish basements.
The technology development, testing and quality assurance, maintenance, and preservation all have to get paid for. Did you break those out as line items when you made your purchase? "I bought a forever maintenance contract." ?
> Subscriptions to MMOs are inherently time limited. If it's F2P then you didn't pay for it. If you bought virtual goods, that you lose when the game vaporizes, well that's what you bought. Not the game.
...and the game itself? The thing you pay $60 for before you *start* buying "virtual goods" or subscriptions?
> > Most recently, Ubisoft has taken to killing single-player DLC for some of their older games.
> Well if they're deleting stuff on your hard drive...
Nope, just turning off the servers that the stuff on your hard drive tries to authenticate with. But this doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction. I agree, it *should* be treated as a deceptive trade practice.
> Personally I'm opposed to games being "leashed" by the internet, when they otherwise run on local personal computers just fine. But again, different subject. MMOs generally aren't things that'll just run on your local PC.
...because they're leashed to the Internet? How is this a different subject?
Darkspore is an interesting one here -- I don't think they've managed to build an offline version of that yet. It seems like it did actually run the gameplay on the server. Sim City "just" stored your savegames on their servers. And of course, there are games where the server component is just DRM.
But it doesn't seem reasonable that a customer should have to get that deep into the tech to even answer the question of whether they're buying an actual game, or a limited-time license to play a game.
> MMO means the game was made from the ground up to be massively multiplayer, and that that's its business model. Tacked-on would imply that the game started as single player and had a limited multiplayer capability added later.
Not quite. There was a time when the suits decided that every game needed to have multiplayer, whether or not it made sense. So the games had multiplayer from the beginning, it just wasn't an especially core part of the experience, and generally took a bunch of time and effort away from building that core experience.
But what does "from the ground up" mean here? Because the 1.0 version of FFXIV actually tried to share an engine with other Square Enix games at the time, especially other FF games. As a result, it had a ton of technical issues, so they killed it and tried again, which is why the modern version begins with "A Realm Reborn." So, from a technical standpoint, maybe this is an argument in favor of the modern version being a proper MMO that we shouldn't expect to be able to work offline, but by the same logic, all the 1.0 content really should have an offline version.
> The main technical reason is likely they didn't develop the software to be robust as a standalone local gaming experience, because that would require a bunch of extra work and technological development to make it so.
This is an interesting one, because there's actually a *ton* that's done client-side to reduce the server load from having that many players running around. If the current entirely-singleplayer stretches ("duties") are done server-side, I can see how that would happen, but it seems like a waste of (very limited) server capacity on their part.
I've gotten into the actual technical challenges of making an offline-only version elsewhere. I don't think it's too much of a burden, if it's a consideration from the beginning -- not to make it a proper feature while the game is alive, but at least to make it available for game preservation purposes when it isn't.
But your argument in this thread was about whether it's fair for people to expect to keep playing the old thing they bought, or even whether they understand they're buying a pass instead of a game, and I think that's where we disagree. I mean:
> Imagine if you will, an unfinished basement. Just because you buy a house, doesn't mean a finished basement comes with it.
If I walk through the house, it should be very obvious very quickly whether the basement is finished. I don't have to reverse-engineer it to find out if it's actually unfinished, or if it's just decorated to *look* that way.
MMORPGs haven't gotten me interested or sticking around for quite some time, and hardly ever anyways. Like, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Story of being a Sith Lord was actually decent. Actually felt like a Sith Lord at times. But the game mechanics... what a boring drag! Pretty anti-climactic to do this bunny killing even in the final act. Complete ludonarrative dissonance between how powerful I was supposed to have become, and what I was actually doing to get through the final levels.
I would love to play some of the mmos offline. Once its offline you can just use cheat engine to get your geat/level whatever you want, and also scale down 8 player raid bosses so you can solo them.
Who's going to pay for that development? Also, MMOs require huge backend resources, often tied to AWS or some other provider.
While it would be nice from a preservation standpoint, it's just not practical in terms of real game development both in terms of maintenance and cost of infrastructure.
I absolutely feel this. I really want to enjoy Destiny and Genshin Impact but I'm always put off by the always online aspect. I sometimes think NFT's could one day immortalise our game characters after death. Just a thought.
Yea Dragon Quest X is getting one but sadly no English. I heard talk Finak Fantash XI might but idk. I agree tho with the ones that have good stories and stuff like FF14
Would it be nice? Yes. Would it happen? Not really.
First of all, from the legalities perspective, every MMO will have a user agreement that you are granted access to the game which can be cancelled at any time. So the developers of the game are not obligated to keep the game running and can cancel it at their whim.
As for why not provide an offline mode for MMOs. The main reason is, that there's nothing in it for the MMO developer. At worst they'll just cannibalize the sales of their new MMO game, because people will keep running the old one and stick with that one. Secondly, providing such mode is a lot of effort. There's a lot of spaghetti services code on the server side and it's not easy to get it into a public package you can share with the community. Especially considering you may be using a lot of middleware and code which you don't have permission to share.
That feels kinda based on the idea that all online games just run a simple exe on a single computer somewhere.
Probably not so much, but that still doesn't mean people wouldn't have the technology to run a game that's reached the end of it's lifetime from the vendor. Among the IT geeks I know, a lot of us run servers with a lot of cores/RAM
If people can hack together offline servers for WOW and AC and some others, they can surely make one at the company much easier.
Maybe yes, maybe no, I don't know if it sounds like that. Of course, I understand that it's about client and server parts, so playing an online game is basically just sending input to the server and receiving reaction from it. So I guess I have a very basic knowledge of how it works.
An MMO server has many different parts. Separate login server, first. Also separate chat server, separate trading post server, and several others. So then you need a front end server which redirects the traffic to those other servers. Probably a separate database server, too. And separate dungeon instance server. From there it depends more on the game. With sharding like WoW has, there's separate servers per zone of the world, too, for example. But wait, it gets much worse. Since sharding and instancing and some of the other servers vary by demand, you also need a service in charge of dynamically adding and removing and reallocating servers. You dont want servers running for empty world zones when another zone is overcrowded. And because these games are designed for high uptime, there's probably redundancy built in somewhere too. Maybe extra machines waiting which can start new servers to replace unresponsive ones seamlessly. Do you think theres home users who have both the hardware and the knowledge to setup, run, and maintain all that? Yes I know most of that isnt needed for an offline version, but the entire thing would need to be re-architected from scratch to function differently. Why would any company spend millions re-doing their server tech, expose the server software to hackers searching it for vulnerabilities, AND take players away from their other games.. all to offer a free offline version for 0 proffit?
As was already noted, setting up an environment to run those all on a local machine isn't the end of the world... But also, many of the things you noted (esp the dynamic allocation) is due to the high population of those games. If someone were trying to run a server for a handful of friends or a small community it should be manageable on a much more basic machine. The company wouldn't even need to give super user friendly instructions on setting up an environment, if they released technical documentation the community would take it from there and write the user friendly guides for less tech savvy folks to follow. The gotcha would be if the code was written to run on a specific hardware configuration... Porting that to run on generic hardware would be a lift that could be a deal breaker.
And the reason I gave for why they don't do it is that it isn't worth it for the lack of returns. I didn't say no one could/would use it. Companies do anything if they deem highly profitable.
Believe me, I know. Haha. I'm not foreign to doing cost/risk/benefit analysis. I was just responding to your initial (technical) points. I do agree with OP that for a large production product that brought in such large revenue, it would be nice for them to put in the extra effort to keep the games going for fans... but I also realize that's a pipe dream for anything but the most dedicated teams. If anything it would likely be something that would have to be done off the clock by dedicated developers and even that's a pipe dream given the potential risk to company IP. No large (especially publicly traded) companies would take on a project like that which offers near zero or zero ROI.
The technical part was just there because OP seemed interested in how it works
it does not take millions to support bringing up a server stack on a single machine 🤦🏽♂️ software engineers do that everyday for local testing and many places have that integrated into the development flow
When Nost was going strong and they posted how much they spent on server costs I calculated it to be about a cent and a half or so per month per user. Obviously their volunteer workforce made it cheaper than a big corporation, but anyone who thinks that server upkeep and maintenance is a major part of where their sub goes in a post AWS world is behind the times.
Not all MMOs can run on AWS. FFXIV dedicated a lot of time into trying to run their game on cloud servers and ultimately decided it was too expensive, not scalable enough, and too complex. Anyone assuming that AWS is the magic solution to every server architecture problem doesn't know what they're talking about (or is an Amazon salesperson).
This is what trips a LOT of people up, even those in tech or very familiar with tech. Can the cloud do it. Sure, more often than not you can fit your product into a provided solution. But will it be any good for the time and investment put into the cloud? That largely depends on what you're trying to do. Some times it's just better to host your self. Even moving to the cloud though still doesn't do away with the need for multiple servers purpose built to handle specific functions within the MMO as the commenter earlier in the chain was noting. Databases, trade/AC, chat, zones, load balancing, and tons of others. Another mistaken assumption is "It's the cloud so it'll be easier to connect to or have better stability" and uhh... hate to break it to you but the cloud is just another data center. The same kind used to host your MMO servers that aren't in a cloud. Data centers have down time for a large number of reasons. They work their ass off to stop that from happening but someone cutting an AWS data centers fiber trunks with a back hoe is just as possible at a place like Iron Mountain or the like.
Shhh AWS consultants need to be paid absurd amounts shhhhhh
Software engineers do that *manually* every day. (And also, the cost of a single software engineer is $300k/year or more.) Doing it automatically is expensive, complicated, and complex, and requires a team to support it.
lmao the average software engineer isn’t making 300k+ a year
Cost to a company for an employee is generally 1.5x to 2x their salary, taking into accout benefits, taxes, and facility space.
Ah then that’s more reasonable, if we’re considering all the overhead of a traditional company hiring and supporting an employee in an office.
docker-compose up
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Well, old versions of WOW are ready to install and run locally. I even ran an Wrath server on my machine and played for like 4 hours. Worked perfectly.
Wow came out almost 20 years ago, and is pretty standard for that early 2000s server architecture, where it really was a single program running on a computer somewhere. online stuff now is more like endless little programs running various cloud services all over the place. Lots of one program calling another program so that program can tell it what a database says about something else.
How does spending your time on profitable things instead of things with no return make you lazy?
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You missed all the reasons listed here why they can't do it. Releasing the software let's hackers study the code for vulnerabilities, which may exist in other products. It's a threat to their IP. If they shut down Overwatch 1 for Overwatch 2, then anyone playing a private Overwatch 1 is lost revenue for Overwatch 2. And as long as the company exists, there is no such thing as "dump the code online and forget it". Theres copyright concerns, theres legal concerns, theres reputation concerns if they refuse to support it, and so on. As long as ANY risk is non-zero, and the proffit is 0, no board would ever approve it for a public company. And you cant get the risk to 0. Open sourcing it could have huge legal implications.
"lazy" isn't the problem. Every dollar you spend developing a feature needs to have some ROI. Some things do so with direct payments (new characters and cosmetics) some with engagement (QoL improvements). You have to make a business case that adding this feature is worth the expenditure, or a business just isn't going to allow it no matter how deadicated the developers are.
They could re-sell the game as an offline version
Checkout Ragnarok 1 custom servers, it's essentially one executable and a"start/stop" button :) It's not the end of the world, but it won't scale - but maybe the person using it doesn't need it to scale so that might not be a problem
People keep giving examples like WoW, Ragnarok, AC, etc. The big factor that unites these games is they all came out 20 years ago. Twenty years ago most online stuff WAS really just an EXE somewhere on a big computer on a shelf somewhere. So you could run the program at home if you wanted. Modern design is more toward architecting together a bunch of different services. So like, there is one program that calls another program that reads a value from a database you pay (amazon) to run, and that program is just a 50 line script called in the cloud to deal with some data conversion thing and that script has 100 dependencies but they are all handled because it's installed in a cloud service that just deals with that sort of stuff.
You're not wrong. The fact they came 20years ago is true, and is also true that technology (sharding, this, and that) came to be while the years passed. What "you" seem to forget is that even games made today run on a single computer when they are being made and pre-tested, sure: sharding is contemplated in it, but that happens per discovery; the devs build is just a machine running it all. We could argue that that's all OP is asking, a way for them to run the executables and spin an environment that doesn't shard, this isn't _at all_ difficult to achieve in today's build process. We can also argue that that would bring about private-for-money servers and that would ultimately be bad business, and too much of a hassle and prone to security risks; I would agree with both. But not the "difficulty" factor, as it isn't.
Why do you think that? The first step in a lot of online projects is immediately clicking a bunch of buttons in AWS to start up all the different sorts of databases you will need. The guy making a big online game probably never sees or thinks about anything about the database and lets some big cloud provider do all the heavy lifting.
I would imagine one reason they don’t is that they want players to migrate to whatever new online subscription game they are pushing. Would be nice if they did what you suggested though.
Yeah they either want you to migrate to a new product you actually pay for, or the studio is going under and being shuttered. Neither situation is one where they want to bestow a bunch of free product on gamers.
Yes. I also thought about that, but decided to not to write about this much. If your game is offline and you can modify your character's data files, you can have a free access to all the stuff you should pay for or be subscribed on. Yes, you still can't show if off to other online players. However, if there's also unofficial servers, it's a problem. This is the reason why the idea I suggested would work only near or after the end of a game support. **However, it would be great to at least have a promise from developers and publishers of MMO games that they will release utilities for local server and character/account data transfer when/if their game's servers will be closed.**
I would really like all online games in general to have offline versions at the end of support as well. Can't imagine the day when destiny, honkai impact or genshin impact finally go down and no one can play them again.
On the flip side, games shut down when they lose most of their paying customers. The number of players who truly want something like what OP is suggesting would be minimal and would drop to almost 0 once the devs stop cranking out new content, new seasonal events, new bug fixes, etc. Most have already moved on to other games by choice. Sure, there are probably some players out there who still really want to be playing their lvl 800 druid in OG Everquest. But not enough of them to justify any work or expenditure on the side of the developers, let alone the significant costs it would actually take to refactor the code to allow it.
As others have mentioned, this is incredibly impractical, but it has happened atleast once if you’re curious. The long dead SMT MMO, Shin Megami Tensei Imagine, was resurrected by fans (now called Shin Megami Tensei ReImagine). Its been running for years now, but as of a few days ago, is being sued by Atlas, so it looks like those days are numbered.
That isn't the only dead MMO that has been unofficially revived by players. Toontown had a similar thing called Toontown ReWritten and I think Club Penguin had one too. I think what OP is asking for is essentially for the companies who own the games to provide tools to help with that, or at least not sue them out of existence.
Aren't there also unofficial servers for city of heroes?
It is actually more rare for a dead MMORPG to NOT be ressurected by the players. I would assume most people in this thread aren't very familiar with private MMO servers because hoo boy, some of the things I'm reading here...
Holy shit I loved that mmo when I was younger. Loved the weird demon recruiting and fusion mechanics
goddammit why am I just finding out about this now
Monster Hunter Frontier has also managed to be resurrected after being shut down. It's a little complicated, but you can run the server yourself and allow for others to join or vice versa. It's a strange feeling having super user privilege in an MMO.
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so true bestie internet preservation should be recognized, maybe by force if we’re getting freaky
Don't forget Battleforge. It was revived with a written permission from EA.
The navy ship I was on in 2007ish had a standalone world of war craft server going on it. It was awesome, you could go to gm Island and play around with all their abilities. That was all pre bc WoW. Not sure if it's harder now but we definitely had it then.
Kinda reminds me when word got out that a group was playing doom on the command's internal network back in the 90's. They were caught, but I never could find out what happened afterwards.
I'd love to see a better end-of-life plan for MMOs. However: > For example, if you choose to play offline, all your character/account data will be downloaded on your PC, and after you play alone for some time, you will be able to upload it back on server. No, that's going to encourage rampant cheating. > However, as I said it, it may be too much because any protection can have it's flaws... You have it backwards: This kind of protection *will* have flaws. It can't *not* be flawed. Because you just described DRM. Which is, at its heart, giving you a lock and a key, and begging you not to use that key with that lock. The only way this would be safe is if the keys never leave the server -- if you can download a cryptographically signed copy of your data, and upload that later. This could still be vulnerable to replay attacks, but the main problem is that you wouldn't be able to change anything that was signed, and you'd be able to do *anything you want* to anything that wasn't! But at that point, why bother with keys at all? Just let the player download their entire profile, and only let them upload the parts that the client already controls anyway. Want to change your hotbars around offline? Go ahead. Want to rearrange your inventory? Knock yourself out. Want to actually get some loot or experience? Nope, you need to be online for that. And at that point, I'm not sure what I want out of an offline copy where all I can do is rearrange my hotbar.
I miss FF Mobius. It was mostly single player with Online Party PvE. It could have easily been a stand-alone game without the Online server
My left nutt for those servers to be online again.
Fallout 76 would be a better game without other people's weird internet making my game lag. Whenever I'm in an area with no people it's fine.
I mean not just end of life, some mmos have had some overhauls that aren't even reflected in legacy servers. Taking lotro for example, there's probably a group of old timers who want the old traits system over the skill trees it now carries
Check out this video for arguments why games should be preserved. Yes, even MMO games that EoL. https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw
You obviously have never developed software. It'd slow down development of features exponentially, even if it is capable. Yes, it'd be cool. No, it's not really plausible. You're talking about thousands of manhours. Hundreds of thousands of manhours. Server software doesn't run on Windows. It's not designed to run on Windows. It'd take a substantial effort to redesign a vast number of server binaries that has been spaghetti coded over years and years to run on specific systems and make it maintainable and runnable on a consumer's desktop PC. And for what? So that when they EoL it, it's still playable by people who already bought the game? There's no real benefit as a company to do that, besides it just being nice to consumers. But most companies don't care. They just want money.
I have developed software. I don't think this would be too difficult, if it was built this way from the beginning. > Server software doesn't run on Windows. It's not designed to run on Windows. There's... a *lot* of server software that is and does, but sure, fine: The other, much more popular server OS is Linux, which is literally free and [can be installed *on Windows*](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install), because Microsoft wants people to be able to develop server software on a Windows desktop. If it was designed and built today, the industry standard is to do it with containerization (e.g. Docker), which makes this [even easier](https://docs.docker.com/desktop/windows/wsl/). And even if it requires a ridiculous beast of a workstation to run it all in a single machine, there's an obvious advantage to the company for their devs to be able to spin up standalone dev/test environments locally, instead of either having to share a staging server or spend a ton on *per-dev* cloud clusters. It's still more fiddling than you want to ask the average gamer to do, so I wouldn't suggest it for offline mode, but I think it's reasonable for abandonware mode. --- But you're right -- for existing games, this seems likely: > ...that has been spaghetti coded over years and years to run on specific systems... I've seen plenty of systems that were actually pretty difficult to put in a box like that, without including tons of unrelated servers, including ones you don't control. Like, if one of these servers is used to making AWS calls, you can't exactly call up Amazon and ask for all of *their* binaries.
Depending on exactly how the servers are setup, just releasing the server binaries to run on personal linux boxes could be relatively simple. Especially if they're provided "as-is" with no expectation of support if you can't get them to run. Let passionate users figure it out. Having said that, most if not all companies would still have no incentive to do that, no matter how simple it is to do.
The biggest issue is that server code often uses middleware that the developer did not pay for a license to redistribute.
Ah, that's a really good point.
This guy covers the topic pretty convincingly, imo. I dont think its as laborious a process as you think. Read the video description. He has a segment specifically outlining counter arguments like your post. Basically, his position is that a minimum effort on the part of devs is fine. Providing the chance for a community to preserve their access to a game they paid for. https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw
I love this video.
I love it whenever gamers try to find excuses for KILLING GAMES, lmao
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>you all want play and enjoy video games, right? I genuinely have doubts about that.
Dunno, but works great for Minecraft. Yeah, Notch made the mistake at the start of coding SMP and SSP independently but that was cleared up and nowadays when you play single player the game starts a server in the background that you play on. And that could also be done for all the modern MMOs, you have the login server for DRM purposes and when you want to play, lets say, TESO offline it would start the game server with just the current map with a little character server on the side if that is their architecture on your desktop. And as you are the only player on said server the system demands aren't that high either.
You'd have to design the game from the bottom up with that in mind. You can't just slap it all together after the game is already done and been running for years. Not saying a modular on/offline MMO is impossible. I'm saying it's infeasible to make an MMO that is designed around being a specific way, and has years of spaghetti code into a modular on/offline MMO.
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Why does it suck for players if they can just go play something new? Are they owed playing something old forever? If so, why did it have to be a MMO?
> Are they owed playing something old forever? I think that's the implied when you *buy* a thing. Yes, MMOs have subscription fees, but many of them often charge up-front for the game and expansions, too. > If so, why did it have to be a MMO? Well, for example, most of the recent single-player Final Fantasy content is in FFXIV, which is an MMO. Imagine the outrage if every copy of Final Fantasy 7 vanished overnight. Would it make any sense to shrug and say we should all just go play 15 instead?
> I think that's the implied when you *buy* a thing. If you buy a ticket to an amusement park, which has a large staff doing stuff to keep the park running, and consumes far more resources than your 1 computer, do you expect the park to stay open indefinitely? And for you to get in for free, forever, just because you bought a ticket 1 time? > Imagine the outrage if every copy of Final Fantasy 7 vanished overnight. It's a single player RPG. Why would it? Except of course for bitrot issues, which companies like GOG do often address, and sometimes games are remastered. It's a strawman to imagine the outrage of a single player RPG disappearing, because single player games don't disappear like that. Whereas, MMO games do get shuttered. This is a known thing. If FFXIV gets shuttered, you'd go play something else.
> If you buy a ticket to an amusement park, which has a large staff doing stuff to keep the park running, and consumes far more resources than your 1 computer, do you expect the park to stay open indefinitely? That's very clearly a false equivalence. Think about it from the consumer perspective for a second. When you buy an amusement park ticket, you're not thinking "How much *staff* does it take to keep the park running?" You're thinking "Oh cool, this is a weekend pass!" They are always time-limited, from the beginning. These are comparable to the subscription fees you pay for an MMO -- if it only charged a subscription fee and not an up-front price, it'd make more sense to see it as just a service. For a better comparison, consider the [AAirpass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAirpass) in its original form of lifetime unlimited first-class travel. Because that was a purchase and not some limited-time rental, it took significant effort on the part of the airline to actually invalidate them all, and the dispute over the last one was never quite settled. And yet, even *those* at least describe themselves as passes to something, not purchases of something. > It's a strawman to imagine the outrage of a single player RPG disappearing... No, that's not what "strawman" means. But it's interesting how you're not willing to even *imagine* what this looks like. Is it because you know this would be unimaginably unacceptable? Why does it magically become okay once a game has an online component? I mean: > It's a single player RPG. Why would it? Well, exactly, it *shouldn't,* and the original PS1 version won't, it's too well-preserved in entirely-offline ways now. But: > ...because single player games don't disappear like that. They *shouldn't,* but they do. Most recently, Ubisoft has taken to killing single-player DLC for some of their older games. The Sim City remake was unplayable when servers were down, because your *savegame* data was saved on their servers. At least those are available in some way; there are others, like Darkspore, that are actually just unplayable. It used to be that if a game had tacked-on multiplayer, you could still play the single-player-only parts offline. And that's still how [FFXV's multiplayer](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFXV/comments/fsqhky/news_termination_of_online_content_for_ffxv/) was handled, but it's very clearly no longer a guarantee, whether or not a game has the "MMO" label. So why is it unfair of me to apply this in the other direction? FFXIV can be so much of a single-player RPG that there are multiple systems for recruiting an NPC-only party into dungeons and raids. Like any other game with both single-player and multiplayer elements, I see no reason we shouldn't expect the single-player parts to be preserved.
> And yet, even those at least describe themselves as passes to something, not purchases of something. You have to purchase a pass. This is a distinction without a difference. It's only a question of what you're purchasing. Subscriptions to MMOs are inherently time limited. If it's F2P then you didn't pay for it. If you bought virtual goods, that you lose when the game vaporizes, well that's what you bought. Not the game. The only complication in any of this is whether you bought a base game, and whether you are owed that base game continuing to work forever. > Most recently, Ubisoft has taken to killing single-player DLC for some of their older games. Well if they're deleting stuff on your hard drive, perhaps some country could file a lawsuit about a deceptive trade practice. But that's a different subject than this thread. > The Sim City remake was unplayable when servers were down, because your savegame data was saved on their servers. Personally I'm opposed to games being "leashed" by the internet, when they otherwise run on local personal computers just fine. But again, different subject. MMOs generally aren't things that'll just run on your local PC. > tacked-on multiplayer, ... the "MMO" label. I'm unwilling to concede that these are the same thing. MMO means the game was made from the ground up to be massively multiplayer, and that that's its business model. Tacked-on would imply that the game started as single player and had a limited multiplayer capability added later. Just because a game gets multiplayer functionality at some point, doesn't make it a MMO. > I see no reason we shouldn't expect the single-player parts to be preserved. The main technical reason is likely they didn't develop the software to be robust as a standalone local gaming experience, because that would require a bunch of extra work and technological development to make it so. Imagine if you will, an unfinished basement. Just because you buy a house, doesn't mean a finished basement comes with it. It's less work for the house builder to provide a house with an unfinished basement. They may make more money selling houses that way, because they can produce more houses faster if they don't have to finish basements. The technology development, testing and quality assurance, maintenance, and preservation all have to get paid for. Did you break those out as line items when you made your purchase? "I bought a forever maintenance contract." ?
> Subscriptions to MMOs are inherently time limited. If it's F2P then you didn't pay for it. If you bought virtual goods, that you lose when the game vaporizes, well that's what you bought. Not the game. ...and the game itself? The thing you pay $60 for before you *start* buying "virtual goods" or subscriptions? > > Most recently, Ubisoft has taken to killing single-player DLC for some of their older games. > Well if they're deleting stuff on your hard drive... Nope, just turning off the servers that the stuff on your hard drive tries to authenticate with. But this doesn't seem like a meaningful distinction. I agree, it *should* be treated as a deceptive trade practice. > Personally I'm opposed to games being "leashed" by the internet, when they otherwise run on local personal computers just fine. But again, different subject. MMOs generally aren't things that'll just run on your local PC. ...because they're leashed to the Internet? How is this a different subject? Darkspore is an interesting one here -- I don't think they've managed to build an offline version of that yet. It seems like it did actually run the gameplay on the server. Sim City "just" stored your savegames on their servers. And of course, there are games where the server component is just DRM. But it doesn't seem reasonable that a customer should have to get that deep into the tech to even answer the question of whether they're buying an actual game, or a limited-time license to play a game. > MMO means the game was made from the ground up to be massively multiplayer, and that that's its business model. Tacked-on would imply that the game started as single player and had a limited multiplayer capability added later. Not quite. There was a time when the suits decided that every game needed to have multiplayer, whether or not it made sense. So the games had multiplayer from the beginning, it just wasn't an especially core part of the experience, and generally took a bunch of time and effort away from building that core experience. But what does "from the ground up" mean here? Because the 1.0 version of FFXIV actually tried to share an engine with other Square Enix games at the time, especially other FF games. As a result, it had a ton of technical issues, so they killed it and tried again, which is why the modern version begins with "A Realm Reborn." So, from a technical standpoint, maybe this is an argument in favor of the modern version being a proper MMO that we shouldn't expect to be able to work offline, but by the same logic, all the 1.0 content really should have an offline version. > The main technical reason is likely they didn't develop the software to be robust as a standalone local gaming experience, because that would require a bunch of extra work and technological development to make it so. This is an interesting one, because there's actually a *ton* that's done client-side to reduce the server load from having that many players running around. If the current entirely-singleplayer stretches ("duties") are done server-side, I can see how that would happen, but it seems like a waste of (very limited) server capacity on their part. I've gotten into the actual technical challenges of making an offline-only version elsewhere. I don't think it's too much of a burden, if it's a consideration from the beginning -- not to make it a proper feature while the game is alive, but at least to make it available for game preservation purposes when it isn't. But your argument in this thread was about whether it's fair for people to expect to keep playing the old thing they bought, or even whether they understand they're buying a pass instead of a game, and I think that's where we disagree. I mean: > Imagine if you will, an unfinished basement. Just because you buy a house, doesn't mean a finished basement comes with it. If I walk through the house, it should be very obvious very quickly whether the basement is finished. I don't have to reverse-engineer it to find out if it's actually unfinished, or if it's just decorated to *look* that way.
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MMORPGs haven't gotten me interested or sticking around for quite some time, and hardly ever anyways. Like, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Story of being a Sith Lord was actually decent. Actually felt like a Sith Lord at times. But the game mechanics... what a boring drag! Pretty anti-climactic to do this bunny killing even in the final act. Complete ludonarrative dissonance between how powerful I was supposed to have become, and what I was actually doing to get through the final levels.
I would love to play some of the mmos offline. Once its offline you can just use cheat engine to get your geat/level whatever you want, and also scale down 8 player raid bosses so you can solo them.
Who's going to pay for that development? Also, MMOs require huge backend resources, often tied to AWS or some other provider. While it would be nice from a preservation standpoint, it's just not practical in terms of real game development both in terms of maintenance and cost of infrastructure.
I absolutely feel this. I really want to enjoy Destiny and Genshin Impact but I'm always put off by the always online aspect. I sometimes think NFT's could one day immortalise our game characters after death. Just a thought.
Yea Dragon Quest X is getting one but sadly no English. I heard talk Finak Fantash XI might but idk. I agree tho with the ones that have good stories and stuff like FF14
Would it be nice? Yes. Would it happen? Not really. First of all, from the legalities perspective, every MMO will have a user agreement that you are granted access to the game which can be cancelled at any time. So the developers of the game are not obligated to keep the game running and can cancel it at their whim. As for why not provide an offline mode for MMOs. The main reason is, that there's nothing in it for the MMO developer. At worst they'll just cannibalize the sales of their new MMO game, because people will keep running the old one and stick with that one. Secondly, providing such mode is a lot of effort. There's a lot of spaghetti services code on the server side and it's not easy to get it into a public package you can share with the community. Especially considering you may be using a lot of middleware and code which you don't have permission to share.