Just about everyone here has known the pain of losing a game that's near to your heart.
But CoH hasn't been the only game that's died, or been ruined beyond the ability to play through executive meddling. This thread is for those of us who've gone through this sort of bereavement before, on other games.
Earth and BeyondI've been through a lot of game closures. One of my first MMOs was Earth and Beyond - unique at the time because it was the only main Spaceship MMO in existence. It was also developed by Westwood studios (of Command & Conquer fame), so I really trusted them to develop and produce a quality game. And boy did they ever deliver.
At the time, Earth and Beyond was revolutionary.
- Fully 3 dimensional movement (although you auto-centered to a horizontal plane, which kept things from getting too disorienting)
- Three kinds of experience that rewarded wholly different gameplay styles (to this day, it's the only game I've ever played that awards experience for selling your goods for a profit to other players)
- Outfit customization based on color swatches instead of preset colors
- Combat that rewarded fighting smarter instead of standing out and slugging it in a pure match of stats
- Team-play that didn't invalidate soloing (Teams split and shared experience earned amongst their peers, with only a slight boost from teaming, but the biggest benefit from teaming is that you gained a passive buff for each different type of character in a team, encouraging you to build diverse teams of different race/class combos.)
The community was friendly and very interactive. The game had an interesting crafting system where almost
any gear could be crafted by players, assuming they disassembled an example of the item first to get its schematics. Stuff you looted from enemies would be invariably low-quality and in poor condition, dealing a fraction of its full damage, but these items could be sold to crafters looking to expand their repertoire of items. They could then, with the right parts, re-build the item at a superior quality level, up to 200% (where 100% is average). Items above 100% quality were impossible to get otherwise, and 200% quality gear gave you a
substantial advantage when doing anything that was appropriate for your level. Due to the fact that you gained significant amounts of experience for crafting and trading things you've crafted (and not mere pittances like in other MMOs), many players were very much encouraged to make things and sell them cheaply, in order to level Trade quickly. In fact, most crafters would charge you only a token labor fee if you're willing to supply all your own parts for the item - getting 200% quality gear from other players was often both cheaper and more effective than getting 100% quality equivalents from NPCs.
Most interesting of all, at least to me, was the fact that in Earth and Beyond,
skill points were skill points. It didn't matter where you got 'em, you could use them for anything. There was almost nothing stopping you from using skill points earned from Trade or Exploration levels on combat skills. I say 'almost' because some combat skills require a minimum Combat Level to improve, but nothing says that the points you actually invest have to come from combat levels. As a result, levelling trade or exploration was useful even for combat characters, as it allowed them to expand their skill library and be more robust than a combat character that operated purely off combat levels. Even nicer? Even if you hit the level cap in one category, experience isn't wasted - it's split amongst your uncapped levels. If you're maxed out on Trade levels, then any trade experience you get is split in half, and half goes to your combat level, the other half to exploration.
The writing was on the wall for Earth and Beyond when Electronic Arts purchased Westwood Studios. EA quickly, and with no fanfare, announced intentions to close the game, much as NCsoft did with City of Heroes. Also like City of Heroes, there was still content in development, regarding the V'rix invasion and the Eye of God.
This story, though, has a happy ending. When the game shut down, people scrambled to save as much info as they could. Over time... a little miracle happened. A dedicated group of coders and developers got together, and using nothing but their skills and their free time and donations from the community, reverse-engineered a server using nothing but the client and the foggy memories of veterans. What resulted was a fan-run server made by fans of the game, for fans of the game. To this day, I hold up
Net-7 as the best example of how to bring a beloved MMO back from the dead when shortsighted executives kill it too early. I can only pray that the same happens to CoH, sooner rather than later.
Phantasy Star Online/UniverseI make no secret that I'm a retro gamer. I love old games, and particularly games from the mid-to-late 8-bit and throughout the 16-bit eras. I consider this the golden age of video gaming, where new ideas were being developed and just about anyone could get in and make a quality game. Phantasy Star wasn't the pinnacle of JRPG games at the time - it was, at best, a distant third behind the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series produced by Squaresoft and Enix (before they merged), but it still had a lot of heart and a loyal following. I still find myself playing Phantasy Star IV frequently.
Phantasy Star Online was a bit of a new direction for the series. It was something of an homage and a reboot, but Sega never explained just how it was connected to the original four games. It focused much more heavily on the sci-fi aspects of Phantasy Star, and moved from a strictly turn-based RPG environment, to an action-RPG one.
The change worked wonders for it. Your skills at dodging enemy attacks and using your weapons effectively were just as important, if not more so, than your tactics and skills. On higher difficulty levels, even common enemies could obliterate even the tankiest of characters in seconds if you mishandled them. This created an interesting sort of dynamic - there was no 'holy trinity' of 'tank, healer, DPS' - even though there were three primary classes. Hunters, the melee class, were generally the sturdiest, and dealt the most damage with weapons, but depending on race and gender, could also be capable casters, or pure-melee buzzsaws with no ability to cast whatsoever. Rangers had the best access to ranged weapons, and their middling attack power and mental strength meant that they could be decent casters too with the right techniques (aka magic). Android rangers, though, due to their lack of techniques, were the oddballs - they were the tankiest characters in the game, either through having stupidly massive amounts of HP (if male) or incredibly high defense and evasiveness (if female). Forces were casters, all of them having access to all the best techniques at the highest levels. Human males could play at melee combat, human females were almost strictly supportive, newman males were AoE DPS-casters, and newman females were oddballs, being good at either healing... or delivering death to single targets. Android forces were forbidden.
Phantasy Star Online went through some growing pains, being Sega's first real attempt at an MMO and not really knowing WTF they were doing. As PSO progressed through various expansions (called Episodes), it moved away from 'fields for the main plot, missions for side stories' to 'missions for the main plots, fields don't exist.' At one point, it turned into a collectible card game, only to promptly turn back the next episode due to players going "WTF Sega."
When PSO died, many private servers for it already existed among the hacker community, and so the community more-or-less quietly moved onto those. I'm going to cut myself short here and
not talk about those. That would spark a rant that might require Tony to tighten the text cap. Sega would soon unveil a sequel (which proved to be just as much of a reboot as the first game was) called Phantasy Star Universe.
PSU radically changed the Phantasy Star Online formula. Gone were the race/gender restrictions on classes (to much rejoicing). Androids could finally use techniques, and a fourth race, the Beasts, was added. Character customization was greatly expanded, and Mags (little virtual-pet buddies that could be fed for passive stat bonuses, and allowed you to unleash super attacks), were completely reworked. No longer were they a constant, ever-expanding pool of passive boosts that you could use to equip gear far, far earlier than you should be able to - instead, they became an alternative to using a Staff or wand for casting techniques.
The class system was revised greatly as well. The original three classes still existed, and in single-player, they were all you could choose. In multi-player, however, you could level up your base classes to unlock hybrid classes, which allowed you to do more than merely fight, shoot, or cast. You could switch classes for a small fee any time you were in town.
PSU's mission and field system was in many ways a refinement of PSO's. Gone was entering fields without a mission - now missions were necessary to enter battle zones, and the zones themselves would change enemy layouts and paths depending on the mission you selected. To reduce player crowding, missions were spread out amongst various lobbies throughout each of the three planets and one space station that comprised the bulk of the game, and you could open up new lobbies by taking missions that lead to those lobbies. A couple lobbies even had special features, like Casino Voloyal on Moatoob, or the Great Shrine on Neudaiz that would allow you to change your in-game luck for a donation of in-game currency.
PSU also introduced a new, and not-entirely-appreciated crafting system called Synthesis. To Synthesize an item, you needed to find a Synthesis Board for that item, and then find ingredients to fill that board. Then you give the board and ingredients to your Partner Machine, who would then attempt to build the item. The problem? Synthesis takes time - sometimes hours or even days for a few items, and worst of all, you could
fail, consuming the synth board and most of the ingredients. Your chance of failure depended on the levels of your Partner Machine - a device that exists in your personal room in the Guardians Colony, which could be fed weapons and gear and items and levelled up. Levelling it up far enough would turn it into a humanoid form, which could then accompany you into battle as an AI-controlled party member.
Speaking of rooms, you had a
room now! A room that you could customize with various furniture, and it also had storage for items you wanted to keep but didn't want to lug around with you all the time. Your room could also be turned into a shop, allowing you to vend items to other players for a price that you set. The game featured a robust shop-search system that allowed you to look up items for sale in other players' shops, by price, type, name, rarity level, or any combination of the above.
Sadly, all of this improvement couldn't save PSU from eventually getting the axe. English PC PSU servers were shut down in early 2010. Xbox 360 and Japanese PC servers (the latter of which was where I played the game) were killed September of last year. To date, no publically-distributed private servers for PSU exist, to the best of my knowledge.
Dungeon Fighter OnlineI had a love-hate relationship with this game. On one hand, it was Golden Axe crossed with Diablo II, multiplayer sidescrolling beat-em-up action with a skill and level system to keep it interesting. That was beautiful and I've not seen many games that do it so well. On the other hand, the game was run by Nexon, and that means there was a
lot of pay-to-win NX-cash pancake to deal with. I still mourn its loss though, because it and CO were the first two MMOs to be there for me when CoH closed.
As I said before, the game played like a cross between Golden Axe and Diablo II. You had sidescrolling beat-'em-up gameplay, with fantasy characters wielding weapons and magic against various monstrous foes, progressing screen-by-screen, room-by-room through dungeons, until you killed a boss at the end. At the same time, you had items, money, and gear randomly dropping from the monster you slew, a level and experience system, and various skills that could be individually levelled up to unlock further skills in your skill tree. You also had quests - objectives to complete while moving through a dungeon that would either earn you more rewards when you turned them in back in town, or would unlock new dungeons to play (in the case of main line quests). Up to four players could adventure together in a single party.
One of the best and worst aspects of the game was the Rating System, which scored you on how fast and how well you completed the dungeon. You improved your rating by clearing the dungeon quickly, and ensuring that enemies died as part of a combo (either hitting multiple enemies at once, or hitting the same enemy multiple times without offering it a chance to retaliate). Scoring a ranking of B or higher would offer bonus experience for clearing the dungeon, with the rewards being greater the higher your rank got (up to a maximum of SSS). Getting a higher rank would also earn you more money and a greater chance to get a bonus equipment item for clearing the dungeon.
Unfortunately, the game also had a durability system. Your gear could wear out and break in the dungeons, and the higher your level and the better your gear, the more it cost for NPCs to fix it. This more or less forced you to play dungeons of your level, or otherwise the money earned at the end of the dungeon wouldn't cover the cost of fixing the damage that run inflicted on your stuff. This made partying with other players difficult, since invariably one or two people would be lower than everyone else and you'd have to play lower-level dungeons to catch them up. If you have really good gear for your level, you often wind up paying for it with repair bills after every dungeon, forcing you to basically play for a perfect SSS rank or not at all, just to break even. Later updates eased this somewhat, by removing some of the more finicky aspects of maintaining a high rank and increasing the chances for worthy loot to drop.
Despite its annoyances and shortcomings, the game had a healthy following. Servers were generally full, and the economy, such as it was, was active and thriving. Due to it being a Nexon game, there were a lot of goldfarmers spamming up the channels in town, and due to the game's active PvP community there was some annoying elitism going on too, but by and large, things were alright.
This is why it came as a shock to me when DFO's North American servers got shut down on June 13th of this year. I'm a bit flabbergasted - there was
nothing to indicate that DFO's NA servers needed to close. Some people say it was the IP block that was put on Brazilian players (I don't believe it was - there was still plenty of people around buying and using cash shop avatars when I played, so Nexon was still making money). I know it couldn't be lack of population - they didn't have enough server space to handle all the people crowding the game. The most logical theory I've heard put forth is that the current CEO of Nexon killed DFO in order to get rid of one of the last remaining games that was launched under his predecessor - basically, company politics. Even
that's pretty tenuous and I can't find much proof to support it.
So far, no publically-distributed English private servers for this exist that I know of. A shame, because like PSU, I'd play it again in a heartbeat if I could find a nice, small, English-speaking community without too much PvP drama.
