The Obituraries: Remembering Dead Games

[slightlyflightyone]

Did the central server a game you loved depended on get shut down? Did an MMO you play discontinue a questline or location you have fond memories of? Was the gameplay mode you and your friends played together retired? Maybe the game technically still can be played by you, but it has since been delisted by the seller and nobody new can legally obtain it.

For better or for worse, all art that makes an impression on us deserves to be remembered for those impressions. Maybe you have fond memories of Halo 2 Team Slayer matches on Xbox Live. You might mourn the opportunity to acquire Spec Ops: The Line from Steam. Perhaps you yearn for a return to the Leviathan and want to wander the Farm once more in Destiny 2.

Whatever gaming experiences you have that are now destined to remain only in your memories, this is a place to discuss those games that are no longer with us.

[Enbyeon]

This is gonna be a very weird one to mention for the vibes of this forum, but Marvel Avengers Alliance for Facebook ( ) is one I actually miss a lot.

You'd make your own Agent working for S.H.I.E.L.D. and you'd build your team of various Marvel characters. The class and ability system was really fun, but it also had various alternate costumes that changed your heroes' abilities, passives and even class. You also equipped your own agent with various gear to fight in the battles.

It got shut down like all live service games and while there have been fan efforts to bring it back, it's nowhere near really back.

Here's some gameplay off a random channel I found:

[slightlyflightyone]

This is gonna be a very weird one to mention for the vibes of this forum, but Marvel Avengers Alliance for Facebook ( ) is one I actually miss a lot.

You'd make your own Agent working for S.H.I.E.L.D. and you'd build your team of various Marvel characters. The class and ability system was really fun, but it also had various alternate costumes that changed your heroes' abilities, passives and even class. You also equipped your own agent with various gear to fight in the battles.

It got shut down like all live service games and while there have been fan efforts to bring it back, it's nowhere near really back.

Here's some gameplay off a random channel I found:

This is fascinating 0:

I hope more people share stuff I completely missed out on like this. I avoid social games because they are always on a ticking clock, but it means I end up totally in the dark about what ends up coming to that space.

[Phorm The Vixdjinn]

I know it was neither popular, nor particularly good, but good heavens do I miss LawBreakers.

For anyone unfamiliar, LawBreakers was a team-based, objective-oriented FPS that had a distinct focus on movement. The character skills, the speed, the level design - It was all about movement in the moment. The game was, for better or worse, developed by the infamous Cliff Bleszinski and his new-at-the-time development studio, BossKey. The reason I bring this up is that the gameplay feel hearkens back to the Unreal Tournament series. The gunplay felt really really good and solid, and the classes were pretty cool. I wouldn't call the classes revolutionary, but they were unique enough that they were interesting. For example, I usually play a medic in any team FPS I play - LawBreakers gives the medic both a jetpack and a grenade launcher, making them into an actual part of combat rather than "Sit on the backlines and constantly press M1 while aiming at your teammates".

I had some stupendously good times with LawBreakers and a friend of mine.

I'm not kidding about the movement, either. Just about every class had their own movement mechanic, and the levels felt wide open rather than having constrictions and obstructions. There were developer intended routes for some classes to traverse under the map if you were skilled enough.



Alas, the writing was on the wall for LawBreakers almost as soon as it began. It had a weak launch, and struggled to keep numbers up as time went on. I'd never call LawBreakers a perfect game - It had a lot of very real problems that legitimately bothered some people (Note: One of those legitimate problems was not, as CliffyB later bought into, being too diverse in character design. Fuck him for ever even entertaining that idea).

Timing was really awful for LawBreakers. OverWatch was riding the crest of its popularity at the time, and everyone just assumed LawBreakers was a "me too" attempt to BE the same game as OverWatch. Honestly the two games are starkly different in my opinion. While OverWatch is all about positioning and team composition, LawBreakers is much more about movement, momentum, and precision. They were both different games that deserved to co-exist in the same space, but the 'industry' or whatever determined that they couldn't.

Additionally, at around the same time, the world was being seized by Battle Royale Frenzy. So BossKey studios dropped support for LawBreakers, sold the property to Nexon, and moved on to making some shitty battle royale game that did even worse than LawBreakers.

Nexon took the IP and all the software, shoved it in a vault, and no one's been able to play it since. If they'd released a way to host dedicated servers, it'd still be possible to play. But they didn't, and it's not.

It's gone forever.

----

This kind of brings me to a related topic that comes up every now and again, which is: Even games that weren't popular in their moment deserve to be preserved. I find it incredibly wonderful that a lot of the retro games that used to be the target of screaming YouTubers overreacting about "TERRIBLE GAME" are now finding a new lease on life in the streaming space, with people playing and enjoying those titles despite the baggage that has been associated with them.

Just because a game wasn't the most popular in its genre, that doesn't mean it deserves to be extinguished from all history and rendered inaccessible. Sometimes the weird, less popular games are great for certain people, and the most popular ones aren't really their jam.

Even if in the moment the attitude is "Haw haw, that game SUCKS and no one plays it" I still think that's a game that should be preserved and accessible.

Sadly, server-side requirements have rendered so many games nothing more than memory. Which is depressing.

[Flint]

Kind of tragicomically, classic WoW and particularly the Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King era. It's the part of the game's history where I (and many others) think the game peaked: in mechanics, in quests, in overall gameplay experience. Cataclysm somewhat wrecked everything (though I liked the werewolves), and the expansions since have only driven the nail further down the coffin sides. Or at least that's the impression I got - I quit WoW for good partway through Cataclysm (though I didn't intend the break for that long), and started spending idle nostalgic hours daydreaming of going back to explore the old world.

And then I got the chance again when WoW Classic was announced. I made the decision to jump back in when the nostalgia reboot reached Burning Crusade, and I had such a wonderful time exploring and adventuring in that world again - I basically recreated my original character and retraced his steps but with the wisdom and memories of my past experiences in tow, and I had a fantastic time. When they updated to Wrath, I figured I'd finally have the time bubble I had dreamed of - the virtual world stuck forever in the best phase of the game, where I could continue to minmax my main character, grow all those alts I had planned, and have the wonderful world of Azeroth that meant so much to me as a constant presence I could log onto during idle hours to just vibe for a bit.

And then Blizz killed it again when they made the genuinely baffling decision to bring forth Cataclysm again - the sole reason behind why people started yearning for a classic WoW experience to begin with. Classic WoW as it exists now seems to come in two flavours: a modern WoW that just happens to be a couple of expansions behind the primary WoW timeline, and an endlessly rebooting vanilla era experience but with mutations to make each "season" feel different. Neither of which is particularly appealing to me, when all I want is just to enjoy how the world once was.

[Cania]

The extremely brief period where Glitch was a thing. It had that facebook sorta "collect resources, share with friends" loop but disconnected entirely from any social media, and it was just. charming? No goals, really, but also not just a chat room to hang out in. It's hard to explain the appeal to be honest!

Anyway then they went on to make Slack using the technology behind this, and the world got worse not only for a lack of Glitch, but an abundance of Slack.

[dog]

I appreciate getting to hear about Lawbreakers from someone who played and liked it! I never played it but I feel like it's one of those games that can easily settle into being a punchline, so it's nice to get another perspective.

One I still miss is Little Tail Story - a mobile spinoff of Tail Concerto/Solatorobo. It was a cute little puzzle-RPG hybrid where the enemies are basically the blocks from a match-based puzzle game, and you form a little party where you swipe through formations of characters with particular elements so you can find the most effective ways to battle the current enemy layout. It only lasted about six months before it died.

[Xinjinmeng]

Why do video-game developers not understand car-combat games? You give us a car, you let us put guns on it, you let us go fast and shoot things. Just do that. They always have to make it more complicated.



Auto Assault was a massive-multiplayer video game about having a car. Following the WoW/Camelot mode, there were three factions that gated your upgrade path and storylines. A a big problem was that most of the missions were fedex-quests (naturally), but without urgency. Just drive around a lot. There wasn't any incentive to form large raiding groups, no incentive to race or to do stunts, and a big barren world meant that too much of the game was driving around a lot all by yourself. Interest eventually waned and it was gone after only 16 months on-line.



Okay, now, what if Warcraft but in space?

Wildstar was made by former Blizzard employees. The infectious fun of WoW with cute models, diverse emotes, and colorful landscapes were immediately obvious. Crafting and house-building were emphasized, also PvP-dedicated servers for weirdos who were into that. Unfortunately released in 2014, when "free to play" was a rising tide. Wildstar lasted only four years.

[AutumnKoneko]

Okay, now, what if Warcraft but in space?

Wildstar was made by former Blizzard employees. The infectious fun of WoW with cute models, diverse emotes, and colorful landscapes were immediately obvious. Crafting and house-building were emphasized, also PvP-dedicated servers for weirdos who were into that. Unfortunately released in 2014, when "free to play" was a rising tide. Wildstar lasted only four years.

Oh WildStar how I miss thee... I was huge into this game for the longest time, both in the early/mid roleplay scene and then later into the raiding scene. WildStar releasing in 2014 with a paid and subscription model wasn't the only thing that did it in but certainly a contributing factor. The game basically went through several failed and mismanaged launches on behalf of the dev team and the publisher NCSoft.

Initial launch, the launch of their "megaservers" (merging all the servers into a single PvE and single PvP world, and free-to-play all were fraught with server issues that turned people off. The game was also heavily marketed and made with the "#hardcore" crowd in mind. Raiders, PvPers. But those kinds of players didn't really bring in the money, nor did they have much reason to stay around. There wasn't much casual content worth doing outside of housing or misc grinds. Major updates were also slow to start up. All in all whenever a band aid was brought to the game, it was too little too late and the game was in death spiral even before F2P.

That all being said, I really loved the game. The universe was fun and exciting -- the wild west with magic and in space! The humor really tickled me too. And god was it just simply fun to play, with the combat system being top notch. Nothing in an MMO has really come close in game feel for me, and I miss her every day.

[flaxenPhoenix]

Literally why did they have to shut down Pac-Man 99.

[EcoHound]

Gundam Evolution

Was it the most sterling and amazing game ever? No, god no

It was Overwatch with a Gundam skin. But it was competently done enough and was an actually decent Gundam Game and was done in due to Bandai Namco's terrible management. It's telling that the second the game was set to be shutdown and the devs had more freedom was the exact second the progression system was fixed.

[Bridget Endeavor]

Marvel Heroes was a pretty fun ARPG that for the period I played it had really reasonable monetization and a real fun selection of characters that played differently enough to keep me entertained for quite some time. Sadly no live service Marvel game is likely to have a long shelf life anymore as the whims of Disney are very fickle.

Nosgoth was a very flawed asymmetric PvP game based in the Legacy of Kain universe that regardless I had a great deal of fun with during its brief height before SquareEnix mismanaged it and then promptly pulled the plug. I had some good hours of fun and sometimes wish it was something I could revisit.