Just your typical internet guy with questionable humor

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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 22nd, 2023
  • I Cast Fist@programming.devtoUnpopular Opinion@lemmy.world•Gamers deciding to accept an internet connection as mandatory in order to play a game (any game) is the root of all that is wrong with the gaming industry.English
    1·
    2 days ago

    Neverwinter Nights included the game server with the game (nwserver.exe).

    I’m talking about this NWN, which is why I put the year (wrong by one, but eh) in parentheses. Quoting from a commenter in that piece that claims to be Scott Gries, the game’s project manager: “I will confirm that there was no offline game mode. The game required a connection to AOL’s NWN server.”

    A lot of MMOs from that era also had self-hostable servers at the time. Pretty much every MMO prior to WoW had some way to run your own server.

    I think you got it backwards, MMOs were, by design, games that the players couldn’t host their own servers, they needed to get a hold of leaked or reverse engineered server files off the internet if they wanted that. Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Star Wars Galaxies, Ragnarok Online, Anarchy Online, Phantasy Star Online, Final Fantasy XI, all of these predate WoW, none of them offered players the files to host their own servers.

    Keep in mind, a number of MMOs of the time charged by the hour.

    I am arguing that there were fewer of them as a percentage of the total games market

    Fair enough

    I’m also arguing that there were fewer (as in near zero) games that engaged in predatory practices

    Among offline or mostly offline games, that’s true. For online only, the predatory tactics hadn’t been perfected yet, but they were there. The absurd grind for MMOs that charged by the hour/minute was the first step, vanilla WoW had blazingly fast leveling compared to the competition of the time. In game cash shops, while not as complete or purposefully obtuse as the ones today, predate WoW.

    In this regard, yes, the internet is part of the problem, as you can’t have all these predatory tactics without it.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.devtoUnpopular Opinion@lemmy.world•Gamers deciding to accept an internet connection as mandatory in order to play a game (any game) is the root of all that is wrong with the gaming industry.English
    0·
    2 days ago

    I don’t think people had the means to host their own Neverwinter Nights (1992) or Ultima Online servers. Maybe they could, but those were the dial up days, you’d have to rent expensive servers elsewhere for that.

    These were fully online multiplayer only games with permanent progress.

    All of this made for better games because the games had to be worth the hassle of going to the store to buy them or waiting for them to be delivered in the mail.

    I see your rose tinted glasses made physical shovelware games invisible. Europeans might remember Phoenix Games from the PS1 and PS2 era. I personally remember a SNES game, Kawasaki Super Bike challenge and how much it sucked (fall or bump into an opponent once and you can no longer win the race).
    AVGN made a career out of complaining about mainly NES era shitty games. Movie tie-in games only sold because of the movies as “free advertising”, they were often pretty shitty games (Charlie’s Angels and Catwoman being perfect examples)

    So, no, the internet is not the main problem. The endless search for ever higher profits is and has always been the single biggest problem