Multiplayer. Playing with or against other people. A common feature in games, a feature that in many games these days is the main appeal.
But what happens when the service used to play online is no longer available?
The best example is EA games. EA insists on using their own dedicated servers to manage the online component of their games. A service that allows you to find and connect to other players, using EA's servers for game management and to keep track of persistent data such as in-game progress, statistics and leader board positions.
But this is a service that they reserve the right to discontinue at any time, within a 30 day notice. The reasons to do so is of course that maintaining it is no longer in their best interest, in that the costs outweigh the profits.
This is entirely within their rights, but it is hardly fair to the end user. The problem is that they offer no alternative to using their service and also that the features offered by their service doesn't always need to use their service.
A lot of games today has an online component. But very few games offer LAN (Local Area Network) functionality. Why is this? Are these remote server features really that necessary as to make it impossible to play without them?
I would argue that these features aren't necessary and can be designed in such a way as to allow for LAN play.
Yes, a dedicated server does allow for more processing power, to handle a greater amount of data and streamline its transfer. It also diminishes the advantage of minimal latency that one would benefit from as the host in a P2P (Peer to Peer) network.
But many of todays console games (Barring EA), does not use dedicated servers. P2P is the norm and LAN would handle that just fine. If the game has the network code to support P2P, it can handle LAN just as well.
Which takes us to persistent data management. In-game progress, is tied to your user account and stored on a remote server. But it could just as easily be stored on your own system.
But perhaps you would rather be able to access it from any system and have it stored remotely as to prevent it being lost from hardware failure. So why not both, with a relatively simple duplicate upload/download based on progress. This way, it can also be used for local play.
Far Cry 3, for example, does not have such a feature and suffer for it. It offers local play via split screen for it's co-op mode. But playing offline allows for no character progression whatsoever. Why does it not use a system like this or have its own entirely separate progression? The result of this omission is that the local option has far less to offer in terms of choice and replayability. It is, objectively, less of a game.
The only pieces left that truly have to be on a server are leader boards, tracking, and comparing player statistics. But are they really features that we need to have?
Player connection (Finding and connecting to other players), leader boards and cloud backups should be the only things that require a remote server. Things that are nice to have but aren't mandatory for game functionality.
The servers supporting many games we play today will be shut down eventually. And when they are we will never play those modes again. If you bought any content exclusive to that mode, that too, is lost.
Developers need to do more to ensure that their games remain playable, past their ability to maintain it. Reliance on expensive maintenance demanding servers should not be mandatory. We need to demand that more is done to preserve games, in their entirety.
Your thoughts?