Do people still play old multiplayer games?

[66686c9aa4172bane]

trying to setup SS2 to play with my friend and its hard to find any recent tutorials on what vpn service to play p2p on. Tunngle is no more so I'm trying Hamachi. With all the steps to mod my game and get it working its no wonder why people Don't play multiplayer in old games. Just asking if the experience is even worth it? If it is then what other games do you guys think is work the trouble?

[66686c9aa4408icemann]

"Do people still play old multiplayer games?"

Yes. Many do. OG Doom still has an active player base. Most of the C&C games are still quite active. Starcraft and Warcraft - Yup. Unreal Tournament still gets lots. Pick your game really. Overall answer to the question is a big YES. Totally depends on which games your specifically meaning.

SS2? Some. I would not say many.

[66686c9aa47a1JDoran]

"Do people still play old multiplayer games?"

Yup. Unreal Tournament still gets lots.

Does it? I thought when Epic (tragically) withdrew the Unreal/Unreal Tournament games from sale, they also shut down the official servers? Or can players create their own servers for these games?

Personally, I don't play online multiplayer, but I do play against bots on some multiplayer games, though with bots becoming less and less common in new games in the last fifteen or so years, I therefore play less and less newer MP games.

[66686c9aa492eChandlermaki]

SS2's multiplayer is buggy, extremely unstable, and completely unbalanced. It can be solid, janky fun with a friend though.

In general, unless you've both played the game in single player before, I would say it's 100% not how you want to experience it.

[66686c9aa4bf5icemann]

Does it? I thought when Epic (tragically) withdrew the Unreal/Unreal Tournament games from sale, they also shut down the official servers? Or can players create their own servers for these games?

From memory, I believe players can create their own servers.

[66686c9aa4d09Livo]

UT99, UT2004 & UT3 all have fan community servers set up to replace the official Epic servers, so you can play them online. If you have copies of the game, you can either simply change a few settings in a text file, or use a patch depending on the game/your preference and voila!

[66686c9aa4ff0JDoran]

UT99, UT2004 & UT3 all have fan community servers set up to replace the official Epic servers, so you can play them online. If you have copies of the game, you can either simply change a few settings in a text file, or use a patch depending on the game/your preference and voila!

That's good, anyway. But it's a real pity that new gamers can't legally buy the games anymore. UT 1999 and UT 2004 are absolute classics, to me they are to this day the two best arena shooters on the PC, and what makes them even better is that they both have many great fan-made mods, such as new levels, weapon sets, game modes, mutators, even single player campaigns, and total conversions. And extremely good bots, that are very intelligent, convincing (in that they can play in a fairly human-like manner), and definable (as in you have lots of options for them).

Back when they were released, I could never understand why lots of people preferred Quake 3 to Unreal Tournament 1999 - UT did literally everything better, it seems to me.

[66686c9aa51b7Join2]

I don't play multiplayer, period, unless it's with friends in the same room. I do miss online madness, but there's so many games out there that I have to prioritize singleplayer (the best form of gaming) or local MP with people that mean something to me, not strange people on the net.

[66686c9aa530bicemann]

On that note, Unreal Tournament despite being multiplayer focused has some damn fine singleplayer mods. I highly recommend Operation Na Pali (for UT) and Out of Hell (UT 2004).

Operation Na Pali is essentially Unreal 1.5 (since it's set after Unreal 1 + it's expansion IIRC). If your a fan of the first game, it's worthy of a play at least once.

Out of Hell is a mixture of Resident Evil and something more supernatural.

[66686c9aa5abdsarge945]

Community Servers have been a staple of gaming since at least the Quake 1 days, to the point where every major community, clan, and even many ISPs would run their own servers for a whole bunch of games. For a lot of old games (such as CS 1.6), these ISP and community run servers were the backbone of the community because there were no "official" servers. There were even ISPs that would not count playing on their servers against your monthly quotas and such.

Since the more recent focus on matchmaking systems, servers have largely been exclusively hosted by a dedicated server provider, either the game company itself or a specific company contracted to run the game servers. Community Servers don't really exist anymore as a result, and the majority of games don't even make a server binary available to the public.

This is why a modern game like lawbreakers is completely dead to the point of being unplayable, but Quake will continue to have servers until well after all of us are long dead, despite the ownership of Quake changing hands multiple times since release.

For most games, renting a cheap cloud server in your region can be very cheap (I can get digitalocean droplets for $4 a month), and you can usually host community servers on them. This will allow everyone to connect without needing to use hamachi or other bloatware, and will mean no player has a server advantage (zero ping).

Unfortunately, SS2 is peer to peer so you don't have that option, but for a lot of other games I very much miss community servers. Matchmaking has largely been a mistake for multiplayer games, in my opinion, and making everything work based on ELO systems (which are often still used for unranked matchmaking to find players of "similar skill") has resulted in less community identity, more toxicity, and shorter game lifespans overall.


But this is starting to get off topic...

Back when they were released, I could never understand why lots of people preferred Quake 3 to Unreal Tournament 1999 - UT did literally everything better, it seems to me.

UT99 had Quake 3 absolutely beaten for team games. It had a whole bunch of team modes like assault that Q3 didn't offer. This was so important that Quake 3 released an entire expansion (team arena) dedicated to team game modes, to try and claw back some of that market. It didn't work.

But Q3 had it beaten in deathmatch play. Probably because the movement in Q3 is just frankly better, and the moment options available are also really nice. No other game has really mastered rocket jumping to the same degree.

Overall they are very different games with very different audiences, and both were very popular for good reasons.

Neither of them were ever as popular as CS 1.6 though, proving once and for all that quality really isn't a factor in popularity, since CS has basically always sucked.

[66686c9aa5bd9icemann]

I've yet to ever play Quake 3. It's just no comparison to UT. Plus Flak Cannon come on.

[66686c9aa5e11sarge945]

I've yet to ever play Quake 3. It's just no comparison to UT. Plus Flak Cannon come on.

The railgun though