10th February 2010, 7:46 PM
That is, for the original Xbox. Downloads are already gone, online play will follow in a few months.
On the one hand, honestly, it's kind of surprising that they even kept it going this long... this kind of thing has happened to PC games for as long as they have been online, and it has been a very frequent source of frustration. Companies often just ditch older services the first chance they can get. I know a lot of people have compared this negatively to PC games, but if you look at older PC games, most PC games more than a couple of years old which had built-in online services are now offline, and can only be played online through network spoofing on Gamespy Arcade and services like that, provided that the game allowed network play. It is actually only the bare few older PC games which still have their original online servies still running... Blizzard is still running battle.net for all of the games it supports, but they are very much the exception. Westwood Chat, for instance, which ran the multiplayer for all earlier Westwood titles (C&C Red Alert for instance), was shut down years ago. It was replaced by a fan-run server which the games can still see, so if you go online with those games they will still work, but it isn't the original service. There are other similar examples of fan-run servers saving officially disconnected online games, some with official sanction like that one, some with a sort of official sanction like NetStorm's, and some unauthorized like SubSpace (Continuum)'s.
For the less popular majority of titles, though, those online services are gone now unless emulators or replacements have stepped in. Anything that did its multiplayer through TEN, or MPlayer, or the other pay services... gone unless there's some IPX spoofing or something. Any of Sierra's games with online play... not via Sierra's online networks, Sierra is gone now. It's the same for any of Ubisoft's older titles, anything that ran on Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone (later known as the MSN Gaming Zone), pretty much any online EA game not from the past year (this applies to almost all of their online console games too), etc. Unless there's a replacement fansite thing, those games' services are gone.
Of course, because they are PC games, things like fan-run servers, hacked games that can see the fan-run clients, agreements with the publisher to redirect the online service to a new fan-run client, IPX spoofer technology, or direct-IP options still leave many of these games with some kind of online play, if you know someone else to play against. On consoles these kinds of things are much harder to do; I know the Xbox has been hacked, though, so I wonder if anything like these things is possible for Xbox... perhaps not, consoles are always much more secured, but I don't know.
Of course, games that use player-run servers, such as the Gamespy server browser setup found in many FPSes, are mostly excempt from this. As long as someone wants there to be a server, there will be. But that mostly applies to FPSes, not other genres,
For another console example, look at the Dreamcast. Maybe five games have been successfully hacked to see fan-run servers (Phantasy Star Online) or have designs that allow it to still be played (Quake III Arena, 4x4 Evolution), but the rest are offline forever with no known workaround, or at least none that people care to try to figure out.
But anyway, on the one hand, yes, these things are awful. It makes playing games online much more difficult in the easy cases and impossible in the hard cases, and that's very frustrating. I know that finding games with older titles is harder, and maintaining a server that few people are using can seem like a waste of resources to the company, I guess, but still, it's cruel, and gaming would be better if we could start finding ways to keep this form happening, or to make workarounds easier, once official service has been terminated. Just because games are older does not mean that they are less worth playing!
On the one hand, honestly, it's kind of surprising that they even kept it going this long... this kind of thing has happened to PC games for as long as they have been online, and it has been a very frequent source of frustration. Companies often just ditch older services the first chance they can get. I know a lot of people have compared this negatively to PC games, but if you look at older PC games, most PC games more than a couple of years old which had built-in online services are now offline, and can only be played online through network spoofing on Gamespy Arcade and services like that, provided that the game allowed network play. It is actually only the bare few older PC games which still have their original online servies still running... Blizzard is still running battle.net for all of the games it supports, but they are very much the exception. Westwood Chat, for instance, which ran the multiplayer for all earlier Westwood titles (C&C Red Alert for instance), was shut down years ago. It was replaced by a fan-run server which the games can still see, so if you go online with those games they will still work, but it isn't the original service. There are other similar examples of fan-run servers saving officially disconnected online games, some with official sanction like that one, some with a sort of official sanction like NetStorm's, and some unauthorized like SubSpace (Continuum)'s.
For the less popular majority of titles, though, those online services are gone now unless emulators or replacements have stepped in. Anything that did its multiplayer through TEN, or MPlayer, or the other pay services... gone unless there's some IPX spoofing or something. Any of Sierra's games with online play... not via Sierra's online networks, Sierra is gone now. It's the same for any of Ubisoft's older titles, anything that ran on Microsoft's Internet Gaming Zone (later known as the MSN Gaming Zone), pretty much any online EA game not from the past year (this applies to almost all of their online console games too), etc. Unless there's a replacement fansite thing, those games' services are gone.
Of course, because they are PC games, things like fan-run servers, hacked games that can see the fan-run clients, agreements with the publisher to redirect the online service to a new fan-run client, IPX spoofer technology, or direct-IP options still leave many of these games with some kind of online play, if you know someone else to play against. On consoles these kinds of things are much harder to do; I know the Xbox has been hacked, though, so I wonder if anything like these things is possible for Xbox... perhaps not, consoles are always much more secured, but I don't know.
Of course, games that use player-run servers, such as the Gamespy server browser setup found in many FPSes, are mostly excempt from this. As long as someone wants there to be a server, there will be. But that mostly applies to FPSes, not other genres,
For another console example, look at the Dreamcast. Maybe five games have been successfully hacked to see fan-run servers (Phantasy Star Online) or have designs that allow it to still be played (Quake III Arena, 4x4 Evolution), but the rest are offline forever with no known workaround, or at least none that people care to try to figure out.
But anyway, on the one hand, yes, these things are awful. It makes playing games online much more difficult in the easy cases and impossible in the hard cases, and that's very frustrating. I know that finding games with older titles is harder, and maintaining a server that few people are using can seem like a waste of resources to the company, I guess, but still, it's cruel, and gaming would be better if we could start finding ways to keep this form happening, or to make workarounds easier, once official service has been terminated. Just because games are older does not mean that they are less worth playing!