I guess I don’t see either of those games as being massive open worlds but just a modern implementation of old-school RPGs like the original Fallouts.

It’s far better than the game dragging on longer than it has any business to, IMO.

I think this thing with Tencent is the only buyout they’re going to get.

To be fair, that story involves time travel.

I haven’t played Double Exposure yet, but my friends were quite fond of it, and I thought Before the Storm was okay.

I’ll give you the private fiefdom part, but whatever other criticisms you’ve got for the Game Awards, and there are so many, that man loves video games. Putting Highguard there was likely misreading the room, but he probably thought it would be a banger.

Are you calling Geoff Keighley a tech bro?

Friends of mine who played at two different points far after launch still found it to be just as great, even if the physics and facial animations were no longer best in class.

So then if Facepunch were to buy New World and allow players to self-host servers, it would be a first for the genre, which would be cool.

Survival games like Rust often offer, as an officially supported feature of the game, the server code for you to run your own. When a World of WarCraft community server is run, it’s against Blizzard’s wishes and terms of service, and when they find out about it, it gets shut down, because Blizzard only wants you to play that game on Blizzard’s servers. I’m asking if any other MMORPGs offer community servers as an official feature the way that most survival games do, because it would be the first I’ve heard of it.

In an official capacity? Because there’s something like City of Heroes, but they only have 1 licensee and that’s all they’re interested in. Or are they games that call themselves MMOs while doing way less technically than an actual MMORPG, like Guild Wars 1? I’ll grant you I could be way out of the loop, but I’ve only ever heard of pirate servers serving this role in proper MMORPGs before.

It still sucks, but at least there’s a path to playing the game, so that bodes well for this game’s future even if Facepunch buys it.

It doesn’t inspire confidence, but it looks like they have a multiplayer game post-Rust that still works on Linux. Does Rust allow for self-hosted servers?

As an MMO, would that make it the first of its kind?

Word is Digital Foundry in touch with the modder and will be running some tests.

It’s called a “casino”.

I’m glad you enjoyed it, but that reputation spread because reviewers had a bad time with it. It wasn’t, like you said, because the internet just needed something to hate that week. And since it never got a No Man’s Sky esque update, I doubt the consensus on it would have changed much even if more people had given it a try after the fact. They certainly had the opportunity with steep discounts over the past few years. In that time, Destiny got plenty more attention and two or three other Borderlands games came out.

A big site redesign just happened at Giant Bomb, so I can’t view the review, but there’s typically a difference between an always-online game not working and some of the things you listed. Cyberpunk was reviewed on PC, and it mostly worked fine for a lot of people on PC, which is what the early review codes were sent out for. Skyrim crashed a lot but kept plenty of auto saves so you rarely lost progress. In an always online game, the functionality just isn’t there if the problems are related to server infrastructure. In fact, this is rarely punished in review scores, and the likes of the latest Flight Simulator are the exception rather than the rule for it.

But even when there weren’t infrastructure problems, people still weren’t thrilled with the game that was there when it worked.

It’s got a 61 on OpenCritic, and Brad Shoemaker of NextLander said he thought long and hard about giving it 1/5 stars at the time (ultimately giving it a 2/5) because the game didn’t even really work when it launched. That wouldn’t really indicate it was just something the internet wanted to hate that week.

“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.

Fuck, man…all the reasons to do so are spelled out right there.