The new vapourware

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Opinion: Is bigger really better?

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By James Matson
10:31 Oct 31, 2008 | 7 Comments

It may surprise the hordes of people that gave Auran’s ‘Fury’ a wide berth to learn, but I actually enjoyed the Unreal 3 Engine powered MMOFPS. Sure, it wasn’t a game I was glued to every minute of the day while my brain concocted ideas on how to retrofit a toilet under my office chair, but I’d get into some frantic adversarial spell-casting as often as seemed right.

Perhaps it had a little to do with a feeling of personal investment in the title, having played the closed BETA, chatted at length with the various designers about all things Fury and attended the admittedly cheesy Fury launch party in Melbourne.

So imagine my dismay when I learned (as did whatever population was left playing at the time) that Auran had gone unceremoniously down the great software toilet, taking their most expensive IP – Fury – with it. We all screamed with one voice in August as Auran CEO Tony Hilliam uttered those fateful words...

"We have reached our time limit to find a solution that would help us keep the Fury servers open, sadly, no solution has been found and so we have no alternative than to shut the servers down in 48 hours."

Bang! It was game over in every sense of the word; players – myself included - were left holding a Fury game box emblazoned with "This is PVP reborn!" thinking "no, this is PVP buried like excrement on a camping trip". Now had Fury been a single player game, a story-driven gig like say Elder Scrolls: Oblivion this wouldn’t have been such a big concern. Sure, you wouldn’t receive patches or updated content from the folded company but you’d still be able to take that game out months or years down the track and play it to your hearts content. And why not? When you pay $89.99 or thereabouts you should expect nothing less. Unfortunately, the new generation of games that follow the massively multiplayer online model are a wholly different beast.

When the parent company folds, the staff go, when the staff go there’s no one left to pay for upgrades and support the central servers that are the lifeblood of any modern online title. All of a sudden your investment is worth exactly the cost of a blank DVD and the cardboard box it came in.

Now I could have considered this an anomaly, a bad fluke that resulted in an enjoyable game being left completely and utterly without function, but now I find out that Hellgate: London, another hit-and-miss title that I decided to hit will have its servers closed at the start of next year. What the hell is going on? Am I fated to purchase online games whose funding turns to shit after a set amount of time? Suddenly I fear becoming even casually acquainted with a new title lest I somehow curse it to dismal failure. Of course Hellgate: London’s story is a little different to Fury in that the game can still be played offline, but the heart of Hellgate was always the online play and grouping with other players, so mentioning the offline component as a boon is akin to claiming it’s okay that your Bugatti Veyron 16.4 got torched because the CD player still works fine. If you Google around there are rumors that another company may be able to step in and continue the Hellgate: London legacy, but nothing is confirmed as yet.

This would appear to be the first tendrils of a new kind of gaming plague that’s arrived with MMOs, games that can be rendered useless due to mismanagement, poor sales or just bad luck. It won’t matter that you enjoy playing the game and there’s enough other people still online for you to play with, if the company isn’t making money then you might just get the spinal column ripped – Mortal Kombat style – from your favourite title.

The question I’m left with at the end of all this, as I re-arrange my games shelf to accommodate the dwindling number of playable titles, is what’s done for the consumer? It might seem a little selfish, but I’ll refer you to the point earlier where a certain sum of AU dollars was mentioned. While the IP of Fury or Hellgate: London may be a commercially owned and copyright protected item, why has there been no mention of perhaps releasing the server side source code as a freeware application? Then the people who still wanted to play it could set up their own private servers at LAN parties or online allowing people to connect in the same style as World of Warcraft private servers, albeit far more legitimate.

Neither company can really be expected to be making much more money out of the respective IPs (particularly if the company is folding anyway) so wouldn’t it be one last, great act of kindness to throw the server software out to those gamers that did support the title from start to fire and brimstone finish? The likelihood of private servers being created purely by the gaming community is pretty slim, as most MMO style games are ridiculously mod-unfriendly outside of UI changes so as to prevent account hacking and game imbalance through code exploits, so that leaves the ball squarely in the developers court.

Maybe this is just too crazy an idea, or maybe there’s some legal tomfoolery that I’m not privy to which prevents such an action. Either way, I’m left pondering the whole deal as my coffee table gets yet another kitsch drink coaster that looks suspiciously like a PC DVD.

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7 Comments

Athiril Oct 31, 2008 11:56 AM	I never got to play this, the patch didn't work, and i tried getting help desk support last year and they never replied, EB wouldnt take the game back.
icomefromthenet.net Oct 31, 2008 1:07 PM	not much to do but take plenty of screen shots and try the next game
Girvo Oct 31, 2008 1:48 PM	Damn. I wanted to play HG:L and Fury :(
Dirt Oct 31, 2008 2:20 PM	A perfect idea - releasing the server source code once your commercial interest in a game has disappeared, or perhaps a size-limited version so that it can only be played with a LAN-sized group of people -- that way, nobody else is making money out of some defunct games company's efforts. Curious about this though -- Blizzard ran battle.net servers for years without an MMO cashflow model to support them, didn't they? Presumably the cost didn't bankrupt them then. Will they offer WoW servers for free when they're not developing it further?
moofactory Oct 31, 2008 4:27 PM	funny that retailers were still selling it up to afew months after they made it free. Wonder if they got the memo... Anyone still seeing boxes in stores?
danebramage Nov 3, 2008 8:49 AM	This is all "new" in what sense exactly? Is Hellgate the first MMOG to go under? I think not. I seem to remember Asheron's Call being shut down in 2005 and Earth and Beyond in 2004, among others. Both of those games required a purchase beyond the price of the monthly subscription, IIRC. So exactly what's the difference between them and these games that you're talking about that makes you claim this as some new phenomenon? P.S. I just remembered Majestic. That one wasn't an MMOG in any sense of the name, but it did require Internet connectivity. Majestic shut down in 2002, a mere few months after I payed fifty bucks for it.
kunzie Nov 3, 2008 7:14 PM	Think I could legally run a server myself now?

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