Abandoned Online Games?

ejb626

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I wonder how many people still play Halo 3. I guess it's still online technically, but I know that Halo 2 got taken down a couple of years ago. Then again a sizable portion of people still play MW2, so I wouldn't be surprised if it still has a decent-ish sized playerbase consisting of people who didn't like the armor augmentations. Man, to play either one of those games again now would bring back so many memories of rage for me. I still remember being 14 and screaming at the TV.
 

Evonisia

Your sinner, in secret
Jun 24, 2013
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ejb626 said:
I wonder how many people still play Halo 3. I guess it's still online technically, but I know that Halo 2 got taken down a couple of years ago. Then again a sizable portion of people still play MW2, so I wouldn't be surprised if it still has a decent-ish sized playerbase consisting of people who didn't like the armor augmentations. Man, to play either one of those games again now would bring back so many memories of rage for me. I still remember being 14 and screaming at the TV.
Halo 3 is still averaging about 10,000 people at night (UK time, so I guess it's the US peak time), at least as of last month. You can still find matches reasonably fast, but you'll just find the ones who never left and have practised the game to an art form.

OT: Call of Duty: World at War is largely dead, sadly. At least with CoD 4, MW2, Black Ops and MW3 there's a few thousand more people to play something other than Team Deathmatch. World at War, at least the 360, nope, sadly.

Then again the only Call of Duty that has "survived" the previous one since CoD 4 is Black Ops II, which still managed to reach peaks of over 200k people online during the early summer of this year (on the 360).
 

ejb626

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Evonisia said:
ejb626 said:
I wonder how many people still play Halo 3. I guess it's still online technically, but I know that Halo 2 got taken down a couple of years ago. Then again a sizable portion of people still play MW2, so I wouldn't be surprised if it still has a decent-ish sized playerbase consisting of people who didn't like the armor augmentations. Man, to play either one of those games again now would bring back so many memories of rage for me. I still remember being 14 and screaming at the TV.
Halo 3 is still averaging about 10,000 people at night (UK time, so I guess it's the US peak time), at least as of last month. You can still find matches reasonably fast, but you'll just find the ones who never left and have practised the game to an art form.

OT: Call of Duty: World at War is largely dead, sadly. At least with CoD 4, MW2, Black Ops and MW3 there's a few thousand more people to play something other than Team Deathmatch. World at War, at least the 360, nope, sadly.

Then again the only Call of Duty that has "survived" the previous one since CoD 4 is Black Ops II, which still managed to reach peaks of over 200k people online during the early summer of this year (on the 360).
I just thought of another Halo game that I bet is pretty dead. Halo Wars. The swan song of Ensemble Studios, and it was incredibly basic, whoever can build an army of their Uberunit the fastest wins the match. It never seemed all that vibrant during its heyday, I wonder how it's doing now.
 

Evonisia

Your sinner, in secret
Jun 24, 2013
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ejb626 said:
Evonisia said:
ejb626 said:
I wonder how many people still play Halo 3. I guess it's still online technically, but I know that Halo 2 got taken down a couple of years ago. Then again a sizable portion of people still play MW2, so I wouldn't be surprised if it still has a decent-ish sized playerbase consisting of people who didn't like the armor augmentations. Man, to play either one of those games again now would bring back so many memories of rage for me. I still remember being 14 and screaming at the TV.
Halo 3 is still averaging about 10,000 people at night (UK time, so I guess it's the US peak time), at least as of last month. You can still find matches reasonably fast, but you'll just find the ones who never left and have practised the game to an art form.

OT: Call of Duty: World at War is largely dead, sadly. At least with CoD 4, MW2, Black Ops and MW3 there's a few thousand more people to play something other than Team Deathmatch. World at War, at least the 360, nope, sadly.

Then again the only Call of Duty that has "survived" the previous one since CoD 4 is Black Ops II, which still managed to reach peaks of over 200k people online during the early summer of this year (on the 360).
I just thought of another Halo game that I bet is pretty dead. Halo Wars. The swan song of Ensemble Studios, and it was incredibly basic, whoever can build an army of their Uberunit the fastest wins the match. It never seemed all that vibrant during its heyday, I wonder how it's doing now.
I actually play Halo Wars on and off every few months. For the last year or so it's been at a thousand people, but it's still just as limited as it always was. 2v2, as usual, is dead, the rest you can find games in most of the time.
 

MHR

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Wurm online is an indie MMO that never really had a bunch of people to begin with, but the interesting thing about it is that the whole gimmick of the game is that it takes hours and hours to get your skill levels up and to get anything built or crafted. I guess it's kind of like Rust but takes an age to do anything. They have to build their own roads, level their own rough-hewn property in the forest, build their own houses, defensive walls (for decoration, privacy, or defense from players,) and carve mines through mountains to find mineral veins. All of which can take hours of progress-bar based gameplay.

People eventually get bored and leave, and now there probably aren't very many people left playing, but what they've left behind are actual ruins in varying states of decay. Fences and walls can have gaps from the gradual decay of their damage statistics, and what is left are abandoned properties big and small. Empty fortress towns with iron lamp posts, cobbled roads and paved slabs give way to grass and the wild. Forges, ovens, and furniture still standing where the walls of the wooden houses they were in have decayed away. Dark abandoned mines dot the mountainsides and can be either sprawling caverns or twisting tunnels, sometimes infested by spiders, goblins, scorpions or cave bugs, some parts of which can naturally collapse, and you'd find abandoned forges, and various other long-term items like statues made from the rock, old barrels, and old tools.

My friends and I made a habit of looting these ruins. You never knew what you could find. One time we were marooned on an island away from home, and found an old fortress that players had made and abandoned. We found some old quality lockpicks in a forge and we just barely managed to salvage enough tools and materials to make ourselves a boat to escape.

I myself made a towering colossus that literally took weeks to build. That's probably definitely still there, but my buildings, farmland, house and mine have all got to be destroyed or gone to hell by now. I probably wouldn't recognize the place if I saw it. I'd need to see the statue and piece together what went where from there.
 

crypticracer

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How hard would it be for companies to release dead games to the public? Or if not to the public to the subscribers. What do they gain by letting the lie? Is it just copyright concerns?

The whole idea of online games dying and just not further existing is odd to me. But I really have no idea how difficult it would be to create serverless multiplayer versions.
 

Isalan

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If your just after the "lonely" experience as it where, you don't necessarily need a dead game, a dead time will do. FF14 is still fairly populated, but I've been known to play at 4-5am and I can wander round zones and not see a soul. Not gonna work on your WoW's or anything like that, but worth a go.

Every once in a while I'll fire up Dota and just wander round the map solo, practicing jungling and looking for little hidey holes/juke spots.
 

tofulove

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i remember shat after the lich king expansion in wow. Went from a boom town, to a ghost town. It was aery and a little scary even. When i use to play wow any time i went into shat would spook me out a little bit. I would think about all the time i spent in there, preparing for raids, bsing with people, flying in circles as i talked in ventrilo while looking at trade chat.
 

Neverhoodian

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I remember checking out the multiplayer for Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight and finding an utter wasteland. I had bought a copy from the bargain bin back in 2002, and most players had already moved on to Jedi Outcast. Just finding a host was a chore, as the game didn't have a server list like modern PC titles. You either had to manually enter the IP address yourself or connect via the MSN Zone. I only managed to join two or three matches populated by one or two players before the Zone pulled the plug and the last spark of activity died.

It was an eerie sensation walking around the empty maps. Where once there had been a cacophony of lightsaber swishes, blaster whines and thermal detonator explosions worthy of the Star Wars title, there was only the sound of one's footsteps and the occasional haunting ambient noise.
 

Raine_sage

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If you don't need strictly MMOs for this I'd reccomend IMVU. It's not "dead" persay, I still see adds for the thing kicking around, but when I logged on to the old account I made (I was 13, sue me) most of the chatrooms were empty or only had 2 or 3 people in them.

3D chatrooms in general are a nice slice of late 90s internet memorabilia. Almost like little time capsules that way, and since the rooms are usually user constructed it can be a fun little game to poke around and try and figure out what people might have been doing there. IMVU is basically like virtual internet dolls. You pose them, you dress them up, you have them stand around in your preferred pose while you chat with other users. It hasn't changed at all basically since it first launched.

Another similar thing would be Furcadia, which is like a furry virtual chatroom. Also mostly abandoned these days.
 

Batou667

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ejb626 said:
I wonder how many people still play Halo 3. I guess it's still online technically, but I know that Halo 2 got taken down a couple of years ago.
The Games with Gold program has given a few older multiplayer games a bit of a second lease of life, for example Halo 3, Halo Reach and Gears of War 1. You're right, Halo 2's multiplayer was scrapped at the same time that the rest of the original Xbox Live service was discontinued - I'm hoping the equivalent snip won't happen to Xbox 360 for several more years to come (especially since there are some current X360 games with cross-generation support).
 

jackpipsam

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Jun 2, 2009
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Asheron's Call.

It's an MMO which came out in the late 90s and only stopped getting updates a few months ago, but for the 14/15 years it got updates.
That said the community is small, but dedicated.
Huge world with many interesting things.

The servers are still online, that could be worth a shot.
 

Batou667

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Digi7 said:
Minecraft is another great example. Old dead Minecraft servers (without all the MMO mod elements) have some particularly potent ghost-town vibes to them. Even more so because someone hand-made all the things you see around you. It's a very wierd feeling coming across an empty little town in the wilderness that has obviously been built by several different people. I once found a whole massive city complete with skyscrapers and hotels with not another single person in sight. I then found a sign that told me there was a town to the north. I followed a pathway for about ten minutes until I got there. I found a patch of ground and spent a little while making my mark. I planted a few trees and built them into a treehouse sort of thing. A couple of days later I came back and it was burnt to the ground with a sign planted in the ground saying 'ha ha'.
That damn near brought a tear to my eye :,)
 

Trivun

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Dec 13, 2008
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I know from experience that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, and also Revelations, are both fairly dead. As in, you're stuck waiting in a lobby for over an hour before you can find a game.

Also, Myst Online: Uru Live - it's one of the most beautiful and eerie games I've ever played, but it's almost always deserted (it's kept going as a free MMO by Cyan Worlds, purely because of the demand from the small yet dedicated fanbase of the Myst games). Considering it's basically an online port of a single player game though, that's not really surprising...
 

PinkiePyro

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Dino D-day its a TF2 clone but with nazis and if the nazi's had dinosaurs and realistic graphics..
most of the servers are ghost towns you can find a handful of players though
 

JagermanXcell

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Good, no one's said Anarchy Reigns yet...

Not an MMO, but Anarchy Reigns...

Great game that Sega decided not to push at all, so not only did it sell diddly squat, but it's community died faster than a fly's life span. Which is a damn shame, seeing as it's the first game to have character action centered multiplayer, and actually turn out decent from what i've heard (just as you'd expect from Platinum Games).
There are a handful of players, but they are far too good to go up against. How good? DMC4 Combo Mad video good. So it's an incredibly hard game to jump into, which could be another factor as to why it's more or less a ghost town.
 

Mocmocman

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Just remembered one. The movie R.I.P.D. had a tie in game, and, as many would expect, it wasn't that good. Most people foresaw this, as it was a movie game. However, there was one one solitary post on the community page by a person wondering why the game was empty. From what it seems, the servers are still up. I don't know if it is quite "abandoned", as there was never anyone there to begin with, but it is empty.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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Hmmm, well I'll say that I was there for the end of SWG which there was no excuse for. Basically Sony killed the game they had built back up because they allegedly didn't want to renew the license although for whatever reason they kept running "Clone Wars: Adventures". There was a niche for this along with Old Republic Online, but Sony being Sony did the dumbest possible thing, not really giving a crap about it's player base. Even now I think with a graphic update (like they did with the original Everquest) they could bring it right back where it left off and with promotion it would succeed since it can scratch an itch TOR fails at.

That said, as others have pointed out most MMOs get taken down when they have no player base. We're currently not looking at a situation where a virtual world can be abandoned by it's creators, or at least not a professional level one like an MMO due to the way server space works. Perhaps as cloud-type technology increases in sophistication you will see situations where dying MMOs are simply left running indefinatly with their cash shops disabled and the doors open. It's also possible if the laws catch up with the realities of virtual business that ideas like mine will be embraced where games that sell virtual property need to be held responsible for that property existing in perpetuity. Meaning if you say buy a costume in an MMO you need to be able to access that costume any time you decide to play, even if you take a 20 year break. One way to ensure MMOs run perpetually is going to be requiring companies producing them to establish a trust capable of ensuring a server always runs and someone can be hired to maintain it (even if you have one old dude out in a shack drawing minimum wage from the trust in the end). Right now we haven't seen any incidents big enough to get governmental attention yet though. The subscription based model of some things like SWG made them relatively easy to turn off, and most other games that died were a relative drop in the bucket if they had virtual property. When something like "Star Trek Online" dies for one reason or another, it might be different though, because while only a "good" game as opposed to a great one, it has that Star Trek license and as a result some truly fanatic players, many of whom have literally put thousands of dollars into the game. If Perfect World (the guys calling the shots more than Cryptic) ever decide to let that one die now with the current business model, I suspect it won't go as quietly, there won't be riots in the streets or anything, but I suspect a lot of people will say "hey, I know this is legal, but it really shouldn't be and here is why, and what I paid..." a few interested politicians and views of all the money invested across the MMO spectrum and I can see laws existing requiring businesses to protect virtual property, especially with the business getting bigger and bigger, and how it's inevitably going to move beyond just recreational games.


That said I'm rambling and getting away from what I originally intended to mention before I got off on my tangents. The place to look for abandoned virtual worlds is probably MUDs, not MMOs. They might be hard to access nowadays (I haven't tried for a long time) but MUDs were basically the way people did multiplayer computer RPGs online before MMOs and graphics. Indeed the skills and such in Everquest (Kick, Bash, etc...) and terms like Mob all come from MUD terminology. MUDs were entirely text based, like old Zork games, but could involve incredibly sophisticated mechanics especially seeing as they didn't have to worry about things like visually showing what they were doing. A high population MUD might have 50 or 60 people on at once (some could boast hundreds though) and a few were quite huge. That said even when I did MUDs there were a lot of abandoned ones, and of course when looking part of the trick was to find a good one that had a lot of players, but not so many than you couldn't reliably login. Given that many MUDs were located on university mainframes and continued to grow over generations of students when they were popular, and then die out entirely when they weren't, it wouldn't surprise me if you could find MUDs now with millions of play hours on them that are entirely abandoned, and wander through them realizing that someone actually sat down and had to type every bit of description (some being quite picky on writing quality), program every mobile, create every item, etc... and in some cases even simple things could take a lot of effort. Good MUDs had both builders creating things, and Coders making code to change how the game worked and develop various subsystems.

Not as flashy as MMOs, but if you want to walk through some dusty ruins, that's the place to go. Sometimes I've thought about doing it, but honestly the last thing I need is more depression in my life, so even if I could find them again, odds are the success wouldn't wind up making me happy.
 
Sep 24, 2008
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Monday Night Combat [http://store.steampowered.com/app/63200/] and its sequel Super Monday Night Combat [http://store.steampowered.com/app/104700/]

I loved these games. I absolutely did. Take the humor and the over the topness of TF2, and combine it with a Moba.

It is the future. I'd say it's the Fall of Rome in their times. So they took the dna of great people and great athletes and made easily cloneable Classes. The Assault, the Sniper, the Tank, the Gunner, The Support, and the Assassin. They can make towers, they can upgrade towers... they have powers, they can upgrade powers. It was a lot of fun.

TotalBiscuit did a good job of talking about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3KxudoBhAU

There is literally no one in the Monday Night Combat. The Sequel might have 50 players. It is why I will not buy any games that have primarily online functionality. They will die. If it isn't WoW, it's going to die.