Alberto Lloria, author at our Spanish partner site 3DJuegos, sees a worrying trend in MMORPGs from the 2000s. In an opinion article, he explains why even the thought of saying goodbye to his current favorite games is difficult. We have translated his article for you here.
Video games are not a one-size-fits-all entity, nor are the gamers and users who spend long hours playing their favorite games every day. There’s a huge range of genres, while others are a mix of ideas and concepts that have worked and the question “Why wouldn’t it work if we mix them up?”.
It’s spectacular art, too very unstable. If you play single-player games, i.e. adventures where you jump into another project after about 10 hours – maybe 100 if it’s a big role-playing game – then you might find it difficult to understand. But with MMOs and big multiplayer experiences, there’s an implicit fear, a sense of “What will happen?”.
I’m not talking about saying goodbye overnight. Or whether they manage to appeal to the gaming community or whether they disappear into oblivion; I’m talking about the games that are already a few years old and that one day will inevitably have to say goodbye and leave their players behind.
Final Fantasy 14 is the rare example of a dead game “rebirth”. This trailer shows you what the game offers now:
Final Fantasy XIV shows new trailer for the start of the next adventure
Everything lives, everything dies. Games as a Service, multiplayer games and MMOs are just like that: ideas conceived with a minimal base and ever expanding in form and content until one day the development studio decides to close forever; either for lack of players, for lack of money or simply because it has come to an end.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what will happen when my favorite online game closes, and the story a friend told me about the closing of Final Fantasy XIV, at least the first version, is to blame for that .
Yes, we’re talking about it again, but Square Enix’s MMO didn’t catch on and was shut down forever until it like a phoenix from the ashes rise again. Still, that’s a “luck” that many other games don’t have. For many projects, the closure does not mean a new opportunity, but rather to turn off the light, hang up your hat and walk out the door without looking back.
If EverQuest, Albion Online or Fortnite say goodbye tomorrow – three completely different examples with more than five years under their belt – many may not lose sleep, but there is an important segment of players who do. Multiplayer titles, especially these MMOs, are nourished and thrive on the experiences made over the years created on their servers.
In massively multiplayer games, it is due to the enormous interaction with the game world and the possibilities of the game much easier to feel those bonds with friends, acquaintances or people that you only see in these games. Still, in the more archetypal online games with multiplayer matches that start and end within minutes, strong communities. These players also feel the pain of parting.
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This fear So, to put it drastically, it’s grown on the games I’ve put the most hours and time into. Years ago that was something I did underestimated. When a new MMO came out, I had no problem trying it, ditching it, and moving on.
Today the situation seems different. I attribute part of this to growing up as a person and no longer viewing certain games as experiences to “put in hours” into; maybe also because the games have evolved with us. I want to say that a reality that was foreign to me years ago has now become more important: the inevitable closure of the game I love.
In games like City of Heroes or Matrix Online, many players swarmed onto the servers to protest the announced end of their games
Of course, I try not to dwell on the thought of “time invested”. Even if I sometimes this evil little voice hear them say, “You may invest time in something that has an expiration date,” I try to get her out of my head.
That’s what we’re playing for, isn’t it? We want to have fun, disconnect from the world around us and have a good time because that’s what we love to do. Still, Apex Legends – one of the online games I’ve spent the most hours playing lately – will one day breathe its last breath and Electronic Arts will decide to bury it, and there’s nothing I can do about itbecause once someone pushes the button, there will be no choice.
I feel like that way of looking at the farewell is less “lively” now. The industry has turned multiplayer games into fast consumer titles. We know that if Warzone or the aforementioned Apex Legends is discontinued, neither Activision nor EA will have a problem releasing another game, but that doesn’t change what they once meant to us.
The reaction of the community to this is strange in the first place. Many don’t give games that are a few years old a chance, out of “fear”, perhaps laziness, of a not too distant closure; however, others who witnessed the MMO boom of the 2000s think about it constantly, and many have seen more than one game close forever, with all that that entails.
For example, one of the cases I’ve been reading about the most lately was City of Heroes. The community received a small warning about the possible shutdown, and many came back for torchlight vigils — and I mean that quite literally — to protest Disappear to protest.
There were many goodbyes and emotional confessions from groups of friends who, once they say goodbye to the game, will likely never speak to each other again. Eventually, NCSoft shut down the forums and removed them the moment the game stopped working, causing the community that had formed broke.
This can lead to a great dislike against the future and lead to a feeling of loneliness on the part of the player. We no longer speak of the hours spent, but of the fact that their haven, the place where they chatted or met friends, where they spent hours pursuing their hobby, is gone.
So this isn’t just about the MMO. Destiny 2 cannot be considered as such, and I know on good authority that my friend and colleague here at 3DJuegosPC, Mario, will get dizzy as to what’s next; my esteemed colleague Ivan Lerner, on the other hand, will feel the same as he bids farewell to Final Fantasy XIV.
When one of the titles I’m currently playing closes, I may not feel the same way, but that doesn’t make his perception any less important than mine. Once you have experienced the closure of an online game, you gain a new perspective. You personally make an effort to keep track of what’s important to you, but you know that it can suddenly disappear – like everything else.
This opinion piece is by Alberto Lloria (@al_lloria on Twitter) and originally appeared on gaming site 3DJuegos, our partner. Like MeinMMO, GameStar and GamePro, 3DJuegos is part of the Webedia network. We translated it into German. In case of translation errors, we ask you to inform us in the comments or at [email protected]. Thanks very much!
We have already translated an article from our partners at 3DJuegos. You can find this special here: How a programming error led to a brilliant mechanic in one of the greatest games of all time