Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Epic is shutting down your childhood”.
Epic games is shutting down servers for a bunch of old games again, okay, like a lot, so I I should have followed up on this, and I didn’t that is my bad. This topic was shared with me uh. Where is it? Let me just search for epic. I think there’s some extra juice on this, oh um, where I think they have been removing games from stores as well, interesting uh. So in while he’s looking that up the affected games include a thousand tiny clouds and Central one. Two and three, the VR online multiplayer will remain up Green Day. Rock band monsters probably stole my princess rock band, one two and three: The Beatles Rock Band supersonic acrobatic rocket powered battle; cars, unreal gold, unreal to The Awakening Unreal Tournament; 2003.
Unreal Tournament, 2004. Unreal Tournament. Three, though, that one will be reactivated and re-released for free as Unreal Tournament 3x, it is already renamed. It is barred from sale on Steam and that’ll be on Epic online services in the future, with cross play between steam, epic game store and good old games.
Unreal Tournament Game of the Year Edition um, the master server has been up in some form or another since 1999, so goodbye, it is possible to specify a master server manually though so players could use, for example, old unreal via unreal.ini tweaks battle Breakers Unreal Tournament. Alpha rock band Blitz, rock band companion, app and sing space. Some games like Unreal Tournament game of the year, have support for direct IP connections and should still be playable without the master, server browser and most also feature local multiplayer options, but once again, Luke and I are bringing up how horrible this is and what it will Mean for the next round of server end of life’s when you just are utterly unable to use these software titles that you paid for. Excuse me rented, it’s very frustrating uh uh. Did you find what you were looking to talk about? No um? I think it all right here we go one.
Second, the reason: Okay, the reason for it is that uh epic is pushing to support its epic online services system, which they say will provide a unified friend system, voice, chat, parental controls and parental verification features. Okay um. I guess yeah like some is this in here yeah like unreal gold, real gold? I don’t know a ton about this game and yeah like if you look up unreal gold on Steam. Right now it says notice. Unreal gold is no longer available on the steam store. Yep, so if you didn’t get it, that’s it and there didn’t appear to be a ton of warning for this.
Recent reviews are apparently like this is a single player game or it’s listed as a single player game on on Steam. So it’s it’s not that they just like, because this is talking about turning off servers right, yeah epic says some titles will still work offline while there’s not be playable at all, so unreal gold is not sold anymore. I guess I mean.
Was anyone really buying it? I don’t know it came out in 1998. It’S not really the point, though I know it just sucks, yeah, just sucks yeah, but my game in history. Unreal gold is just like the first one in the list.
So that’s what I dove into, but I don’t. I don’t know if, like some of these other ones are also off the store. It also sounds like like there’s a note lowered down somewhere, where, like the game, is being re-released, I don’t remember which one that’s unreal, uh three Unreal Tournament, three yeah being re-released as unreal 3x yeah barred from the Steam Sale and it’s on Epic game services.
So I feel, like part of this, is trying to get it to move to their own stuff. Well, yeah, absolutely, it is epic seems to be the only other game store owner that is still holding holding out is like no. No, we will we’re gon na compete with steam. Everyone else has come crawling back, oh except blizzard. Uh Activision Blizzard is still on that blizzard won’t yeah. I am 100.
Certain blizzard won’t um because they’ve been doing it a lot longer, but EA Ubi, they’re, back yeah they’re back baby, because blizzard had their own launcher back when tons of things had their own launcher and they actually had like a launcher for it. And everyone got used to using it before steam just like ran everything because they blizzard is doing an MMO and back in the day steam didn’t support MMOs through Steam right actively um. So, like yeah people just got used to it.
I don’t think blizzard is ever going to bail. Uh blizzard is getting people pretty used to launching God. No, you can just buy Cod through, so Activision part of Blizzard is still using steam. I guess, but it’s expected by Diablo 4 yeah yeah on Steam yeah. I think that’s where we’re at yeah yeah Ubi caved recently yep matter of time.
Anthony’S take um, you know how long should game companies really be expected to keep older games afloat, though, and to epic’s credit, a lot of their older games using Unreal Engine are very open and easily modded. Not all of these games are, though, regardless of how long they were supported for, though IMO once they Sunset games, they should release the server software until the community to restore them yeah. So my point isn’t actually at all how long companies should be expected to keep games afloat um. I can totally understand if you’re like man, we have zero users on almost every day, not wanting to keep those servers going, but it is entirely based around those companies.
Releasing the server, softwares and tools needed for the community to restore them like like Anthony said that is, that is where literally, my entire argument lies, because the only thing I’m worried about at a certain point, because you brought up like how many people are still playing This yeah that’s very valid for a lot of games, probably no one yeah, probably literally no one, but people should be able to down the line. If you want to, for, like literally historical reasons, yep like we, we shouldn’t lose the entire history of video game development. That would be really depressing like it’s actually a huge deal. .