Alberto Lloria, author at our Spanish partner site 3DJuegos, recognizes a concerning trend among MMORPGs from the 2000s. In an opinion article, he explains why even the thought of saying goodbye to his current favorite games is hard. We have translated his article for you here.
Video games are not a uniform thing, just as players and users who spend many hours each day with their favorite games are not uniform. There is a vast range of genres, while others are a mix of ideas and concepts that have proven themselves, and the question of “Why wouldn’t it work if we mix them?”
It is a spectacular art, but also very unstable. If you are playing single-player games, that is, adventures where you plunge into another project after about 10 hours – maybe even 100 if it’s a big RPG – then it might be hard for you to understand. But with MMOs and big multiplayer experiences, there is an implicit fear, a feeling of “What will happen?”
I’m not talking about them saying goodbye overnight. Or whether they manage to reach the player community or if they disappear into obscurity; I’m talking about games that have been around for a few years and that will inevitably have to say goodbye one day and leave their players behind.
Final Fantasy 14 is the rare example of a dead game that has experienced a “rebirth”. This trailer shows you what the game now offers:
Everything lives, everything dies. “Games as a Service,” multiplayer games, and MMOs are just that: ideas that were conceived with a minimal base and expand in form and content until one day the development studio decides to close permanently; either due to a lack of players, of money or simply because it has come to an end.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what will happen when my favorite online game shuts down, and the story my friend told me about the closure of Final Fantasy XIV, at least the first version, is to blame for that.
Yes, we’re talking about it again, but Square Enix’s MMO couldn’t make it and was closed forever until it rose like a phoenix from the ashes. However, that is a “luck” that many other games do not have. The closure means for many projects no new chance, but to turn off the light, hang up the hat and walk out the door without looking back.
If EverQuest, Albion Online, or Fortnite were to say goodbye tomorrow – three completely different examples with more than five years behind them – many might not lose sleep, but there is a significant part of the players who do. Multiplayer titles, particularly these MMOs, are nourished by and live off the experiences that have developed over the years on their servers.
In “Massively Multiplayer Games,” due to the enormous interaction with the game world and the possibilities of the game, it is much easier to feel those bonds with friends, acquaintances, or people you only see in these games. However, strong communities form even in the more archetypical online games with multiplayer matches that start and end within minutes. Even these players feel the pain of farewell.
This fear – I want to express it dramatically – has thus grown in the games in which I have invested the most hours and time. Years ago, this was something that I underestimated. When a new MMO came out, I had no problem trying it out, pushing it aside, and moving on.
Today, the situation seems different. I attribute part of that to having grown up as a person and no longer seeing certain games as experiences in which to “invest hours”; perhaps also because games have evolved with us. What I mean is that a reality that felt foreign to me years ago has now become more important: the inevitable shutdown of the game that I love.
Of course, I try not to fixate on the thought of “invested time.” Even though I sometimes hear that naughty little voice saying: “You might be investing time in something that has an expiration date,” I try to push it out of my head.
That’s why we play, right? We want to have fun, distance ourselves from the world around us, and have a good time, because that’s what we like to do. Still, Apex Legends – one of the online games I’ve spent the most hours on lately – will one day take its last breath, and Electronic Arts will decide to bury it, and there’s nothing I can do about it, because once someone hits the button, there will be no choice left.
I feel that this way of viewing farewell is now less “alive.” The industry has turned multiplayer games into quick consumption titles. We know that if Warzone or the aforementioned Apex Legends are shut down, neither Activision nor EA will have an issue releasing another game, but that doesn’t change what they once meant to us.
The community’s reaction to this is primarily strange. Many give games that are already years old no chance out of “fear,” perhaps out of laziness, of a not-so-distant closure; others, however, who witnessed the MMO boom in the 2000s, think about it constantly, and many have seen more than one game close forever, with all that entails.
One of the cases I have read about the most recently is, for example, City of Heroes. The community received a small warning before the possible closure, and many returned to vigil protests – and I mean that literally – to protest against the disappearance.
There were many farewells and emotional confessions from groups of friends who, once they said goodbye to the game, would probably never speak to each other again. Ultimately, NCSoft shut down the forums and took them down in the moment when the game no longer worked, breaking the community that had formed.
This can lead to a great aversion to the future and a feeling of loneliness on the part of the player. We are no longer talking about the hours spent, but about the fact that their refuge, the place where they conversed or met friends, where they pursued their hobby for hours, is gone.
So, it’s not just about the MMO. Destiny 2 cannot be considered as such, and I know from a reliable source that my friend and colleague here at 3DJuegosPC, Mario, will get dizzy at the question of what comes next; my esteemed colleague Ivan Lerner, on the other hand, will feel the same when saying goodbye to Final Fantasy XIV.
If one of the titles I am currently playing shuts down, I may not feel the same way, but that doesn’t make its perspective any less important than mine. Once you experience the closure of an online game, you gain a new perspective. You personally strive to keep what is important to you in sight, but you know it can suddenly disappear – just like everything else.
This opinion article is by Alberto Lloria (@al_lloria on Twitter) and originally appeared on the gaming site 3DJuegos, our partner. 3DJuegos belongs to the Webedia network, which includes MeinMMO, GameStar, and GamePro.
We have already translated one article from our partners at 3DJuegos. You can find this special here: How a programming error led to a brilliant mechanic in one of the greatest games of all time
