Yeah, I think that’s why you see largely smaller companies picking up “game servicing” tasks – resurrecting old games and rebuilding a fanbase. The money pool might be too small for a larger company to want the managerial headache. ex-Sony Online is small enough now that they’re an appropriate size to spin up a ten-man live team to run this.
This also assumes a decently-organized/maintained codebase. We’ve heard enough horror stories of lost source code stymieing remakes (Silent Hill 2 looms large); even if it was just poorly maintained it can be a royal pain to build the project. If that one guy running the network code had exclusive knowledge, well, ouch.
It would be nice, but Blizzard has said many times, often very bluntly, that they will not do legacy servers. They famously went so far as to say – and this is a direct quote – “you think you want them, but you really don’t.” Will it happen five years from now when the game is on its deathbed? Maybe. Certainly not before then. Money aside, Blizzard is stubborn. If they let you play Old Wow to them it would mean that New Wow has failed. Like Valve, Blizzard operates under the assumption that certain design principles are immutably better than other ones. They move in one direction, toward simplicity, elegance, ease of use, whatever you want to call it. Not only has the game itself moved in all of those directions, but the simple idea of offering multiple versions of the same game would cut against their corporate philosophy. They shut down Nostalrius because it got big enough to make them look like idiots, but it could never get big enough to make them change their minds.
But as far as this is concerned:
I just really don’t think that is a concern at all. I would imagine a very large percent of the people who play on private servers would pay to play on official ones. The people on these servers are not casual players. They’re all people who previously paid to play the game, and even the best private servers have a bunch of problems that would be fixed on official servers (I played on Nostalrius for a few months from the day it launched; one of the reasons I quit is because of how many bugs and scripting issues there were). And of course for every person who plays Nostalrius, how many people exist who don’t but would be interested in checking out an official server?
Here’s the real issue on the money front, though as I’ve said I don’t think money one way or another plays into it: on live wow, there is a cash shop. You can buy mounts and other cosmetic shit. And more importantly than that, they came up with the ingenious idea of allowing players to buy game time with in game gold. I say it’s ingenious because the way it works is you buy a token off the auction house for an amount of gold that is determined by the markets on a per region basis. But those tokens don’t come directly from Blizzard; you buy them from other players, who buy them from Blizzard for the purpose of selling them for gold. The kicker here is the token, which gives you a month of game time once you buy it from the AH, costs more money to buy from blizzard than game time does. So here’s the upshot: if you play wow regularly, you are almost certainly paying for your game time with tokens, which means Blizzard is effectively seeing more money from you than they would if you were paying with money. Neither of these things would fly on legacy servers.
Took me a second to remember that Valken/Cybernator is the only(?) one that got a fantrans to restore plot. This is cool! I hope it eventually leads to english localizations of Leynos 2 and Valken 2.
The thing that stuck out the most about Fear Effect (beyond the whole lesbians thing) was that it used a lot of FMV to create its environments. In that sense it is very much of its era and I kinda wonder if they’ll even bother to try and keep this aspect.
Well probably not, I just read about it/saw screens of it and it’s all top-down tactical, ala New Shadowrun, and they’ve explicitly stated they’re avoiding making a “sequel” and that this is a “new experience” in the same world.
Then they say they got the cancelled Fear Effect 3 script from Square, lol.
The depictions of hell were certainly something though. Genuinely freaky at the time. Most of the backlash really comes from the fact while both were total junk to play since they were Resi tank controls with a roll button in a game about quick reactions (I played both to completion, so yeah) but the Anime neo-noir was really stylish and effective. It was a really visually striking game that you pushed through a lot. If you asked people what they wanted out of a new one. A more solid TPS with the same art and themes would likely what they want rather than a Shadowrun/Invisible Inc clone.
Though whole “Sexuality” argument reminded me of the final puzzle in Retro Helix which was so hilariously cruel and a direct middle finger to the titillation they marketed with that I’m amazed they got away with it even for the time. The game was so stupidly hard, most people likely didn’t see it though.
Oh i dunno, SaGa 2 also has the episodic thing going for it and is a pretty good game besides (the latter is more than you can say for most SaGa/Kawazu ventures, despite my considerable love for them)
Still regret selling my copy of Minstrel Song… or uh whatever i did with it? because i still swear i put it aside to not sell.
I’m always rolling my eyes at old songs being repurposed and butchered for advertising, but seeing this is so much more hilariously in-character than possibly any other option that I can’t help but appreciate it.
Romancing SaGa 2
Yikes the art for this clashes heavily. The blue-roofed houses have no dimension to them, whereas the brown-roofs are pretty okay on their own? But seeing those cute sprites, I just want to throw everything else out. Mobile S-E JRPG ports are so fucked nowadays.
Can anyone comment on if those battle sprites are still somewhat accurate? FF6 mobile’s biggest crime against humanity is how the sprites got murdered, however these look not too bad.
Yeah I actually prefer Romancing Saga 1 and 2’s graphic style in comparison to FF6/RS3, and maybe that’s because there’s a uniformity to those games. When I was a young teen, I made a lot of sprite comics (lol remember those), so it was nice to find games that had similar styles.
[quote=“geist, post:905, topic:197, full:true”]It would be nice, but Blizzard has said many times, often very bluntly, that they will not do legacy servers. They famously went so far as to say – and this is a direct quote – “you think you want them, but you really don’t.” Will it happen five years from now when the game is on its deathbed? Maybe. Certainly not before then. Money aside, Blizzard is stubborn. If they let you play Old Wow to them it would mean that New Wow has failed. Like Valve, Blizzard operates under the assumption that certain design principles are immutably better than other ones. They move in one direction, toward simplicity, elegance, ease of use, whatever you want to call it. Not only has the game itself moved in all of those directions, but the simple idea of offering multiple versions of the same game would cut against their corporate philosophy. They shut down Nostalrius because it got big enough to make them look like idiots, but it could never get big enough to make them change their minds.
[/quote]
interestingly, this is pretty much exactly 343 Industries’ philosophy towards Halo
