So, City of Heroes is being shut down. It’s not the first MMO to shut down, nor will it be the last. As Ardwulf notes:
Except… what if they didn’t? What if, instead of shutting down, MMO providers made the game open source? Myst Online did just that. It’s totally free to play, open source, have-at-it-we-hope-you-have-fun goodness. (Or so it would seem… I haven’t actually tried it yet.)
As the esteemed Psychochild might note, there are always costs, and open source systems with or without private servers are not a panacea… but I have to wonder. Will MMOs enter the grey wilds of abandonware, rubbing elbows with pirates and historians? And even if they do, will they just sort of wither as Moore’s Law and the march of technical innovation makes them nigh unplayable? (Imagine playing WoW on a touchscreen or futuretech holograph UI… apparently it’s technically possible, at least on an iPad, but I suspect it’s not quite an enjoyable prospect. Some things just don’t work in a touch interface.) There’s almost no way to really capture the “you had to be there“ness of seeing a game, flush and alive in its heyday, and that’s a big part of MMOs… but there’s a difference between playing a game and reading a wiki or watching videos about it.
I’m not sure… but I do know that I respect devs who release their game to the wilds to let players live on in their game worlds. I also respect those who want to bottle their game up in a pocket of history, so as to keep the memories in a nice rose-tinted fuzzy memory, rather than letting them age gracelessly amidst gaming jackals and vultures.
I do wish historians could maintain access, though (on their own dime, perhaps, not as a continued cost for the company). Just ’cause… it seems like the right thing to do, for the industry and the players.
No fair entering my comment before I get a chance to comment.
A few more comments, then!
1. Game servers take more than just code, they also take expertise. You know like I do that development tools used inside a company look much different than tools released to be used by the players. Sometimes there are just arcane details that devs put up with. (Ideally, of course, this would be an opportunity for the open source people to fix those oddities, I guess.)
2. Server hardware might be a bit beyond what mortals can use. M59 ran on a glorified desktop, but would CoH be able to do the same? Or would it require a cluster?
3. Games still use proprietary tech. I’m sure some elements in CoH are used in other NCSoft games. It might weaken their security to release that type of info into the while. Contrary to popular belief, security by obscurity does work, but it’s not the most reliable.
4. Server tech is a competitive advantage. Okay, this is becoming a bit less of an issue, but still. Why hand a potential competitor the blueprints to a proven stable MMO platform? Plus, why give the players a game to play instead of encouraging them to play another NCSoft game?
5. People who want power are usually the last people you want to have it. Some M59 server executables leaked one time. Those servers were usually run by people willing to break the rules for their friends or a quick buck. People who left for those servers often came back some time later then game balance was all out of whack as powerful items flooded the server.
6. IP is still valuable years later. Who is to say that superhero MMOs won’t make a comeback, and NCSoft decides to release a successor to CoH in a few year’s time? They don’t want to give up the CoH trademark, for example, but giving a blanket license for people to use it would weaken the strength of that trademark.
7. For most people, it’s the community not the game they remember. Most people leaving comments seem to remember CoH fondly as an early (if not the first) MMO they played. The game now would probably not be what they remember, especially not without the community.
8. People say they want it, but they don’t act on it. The Saga of Ryzom is open source, but as far as I know that hasn’t turned out any interesting projects. CoH might be a bit higher profile, but will people really spend time to deal with the code?
All that said, as a game designer I agree with the sentiment: it would be nice to at least play some of the older MMO games that pre-dated M59. It’d be nice for future MMO fans and designers could have access to some of the older games. But, I suspect for most people the open source version wouldn’t quite be the same.
This is an interesting line of thought. It is a terrible shame that so much gaming heritage is likely to be lost to posterity but as Brian points out it is a far from trivial matter to preserve an mmorpg. Given the lengths that museums of today go through I am pretty sure someone will reconstruct the server infrastructure for a few representative games like World of Warcraft, after all someone even manged to rebuild the Antikythera device. but most mmorpgs are likely to disappear without a trace.
Even single player games are not immune now that we have always on drm and the requirement for an internet connection. I am less worried about these though because I imagine that patching out drm will be a much easier job than re-creating server infrastructure.
Looks like I managed to unintentionally wring a mini blog post out of you after all, eh, Brian?
Thanks for the comments!
There really are a lot of considerations “under the hood” as it were. Even working on art as I do, there are troubles picking up where someone else left off. Everyone organizes and functions a little differently, and even something as “simple” as a naming convention or lack thereof can throw a monkey wrench in the works. On smaller projects, that’s usually a small time sink, but in a huge project like an MMO, there are so many more variables in play that it’s almost inevitably painful.
On top of that, open source projects add a layer of dis/organization. For a while, I was trying to help with an open source recreation of Privateer, and wound up with mixed and/or missing signals on what I might actually be able to help with and how best to do so. A well-oiled production team, open source generally isn’t.
Of course, that’s thinking a little past mere preservation, but still, even keeping the games playable on newer systems would be more than a little work. Probably more than a lot of work.
mbp, agreed. I almost wonder if some enterprising museum is already sitting on an archival server for WoW. (And, for that matter, what about preserving 1.0 of the game? More than once, I’ve seen veterans lamenting for the Good Old Days of the game and “classic” servers like the grand Everquest experiment along those lines.) Oh, and yes, I suspect the “always online” single player games will be cracked and preserved just fine.
MMOs are just weird beasts, as “living” games. They are more able to “die” than most games.
Even in a perfect world where all cancelled MMOs became open source and playable for free after they shut down, not all MMOs would remain be fun to play after the bulk of the players leave. A lot of MMOs simply don’t function that well as games without a certain critical mass of players. And I can’t imagine that there are huge numbers of players wanting to play most dead MMOs.
For example, my experience with Myst Online is that the player base is absolutely miniscule. A “crowded” public area might have three players in it. It works OK because the graphics have aged well and the game is fun to play solo. In contrast, when I imagine something like launch EQ with similarly sparse populations l don’t envision a particularly fun play experience. Most of the classes are tortuously slow levelers solo.
I should add that I think CoH actually would be a lot of fun to mess around with regardless of how many players it had. Just playing around with the character generator is a blast. If the game retained the ability for players to design new missions, a few hardcore enthusiasts could even keep the content some what fresh.
I’m inclined to think it’s cut throat. With a book, you own it even if they stop publishing it. Assuming people can love a game as much – well, it’s around as long as a certain executive thinks his bonus isn’t threatened by it. Shouldn’t just accept strangers having such absolute control over what you care about.
Hmmm…I myself am very torn on this. Brian add a lot of interesting points and I wonder too – even if players often wished for their games to last forever and get server rights, do they realize what it is they wish for? how different it might be from before? how a vibrant thing might turn into a shadow of its former self?
maybe, like with all good things, MMOs too need to die in order to leave a wonderful memory behind. maybe we don’t truly understand what we wish for when we say they should last forever. you know, ying and yang and stuff
but really, aren’t the best things the ones that cannot linger forever?
[...] Anyway, with the fun of Flowmotion rattling around in my head, I look at this Guild Wars 2 thing, with its respect for the Explorer mindset that I’m so deeply infused with, and, well… I kinda wish more MMOs would experiment with Parkour and new ways of getting around their game spaces. Yes, I hear TERA has some sort of climbing system, but that’s rudimentary compared to what I’m thinking about. I look at the ruins of Ascalon and think “I’d love to just climb around and go all monkeyish on it (Charrish, whatever)”. And yes, I love flying in MMOs, but climbing around like a superagile simean Spider-man is just… different. I hear City of Heroes has some pretty great movement options, too… maybe I should check those out before the game is shuttered forever. [...]
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