concord-and-live-service-hell.html
I’m thinking of Concord, or most recently Hellguard as of writing this. While I’ve never played either what I hear for the loss of Concord is that it looks like ass. And maybe that’s true for most people. But ass and style are two different things; and anyone can enjoy a style.
What Concord had going on was kind of a space age theme for a lot of it’s armor. Now I’m not going to lie, it didn’t appeal to me, but the cinematic trailers all looked really really good actually. In the world the artist’s clearly were able to funnel love into the game and make the characters pop out. That’s awesome.
But instead of having a game that could become a hidden gym or have it’s little secret dedicated fanbase, what they did was turn off the servers, and remove the game before it ever had the chance to marinate. And Hellguard is getting the same treatment. And the fact that hours can go into a game only for it to just... disappear is kind of sad.
I get that it was 100% a cash grab. Something trying to mimic something like overwatch. I think Concord could’ve done good as like a movie or a tv series or something, because it’s style is genuinely distinct and I got the impression it could grow on a person. But for me the real loss is the artists time creating something that is deemed not worthy of continuing, but then fully snuffing it out. And this kind of brings me back to my favourite topics.
Self hosting. Come on, left 4 dead’s and early CS 1.6 are still running. Minecraft probably has a ton of servers. And one could argue these older games a lot of people own because of how cheap they are now and how everyone has a copy, but what I’m saying is the main thing tying these games together is the fact that the community has the power of life and death for them. No one else can come in and shut down the community servers, the games will just continue to exist so long as people want to play them.
And if people wanted to play Concord, I think they should’ve had that right. But so long as they make games with the intention of selling something in the game it’s hard to make that work. Obviously mods could bypass the whole thing, but I guess I look at something like counterstrike 2 or team fortress 2 and they made the balance between in game skins that are unique and mods. People still use the in game skins all the time.
Anyway. Just some ramblings. Peace.