Hi everyone! Just want to jump in and make a quick clarification - in the third section of the video I use the phrase "game developers" a lot, when something like "game companies" would be more apt. It's usually (but not always!) the publishers rather than the developers that do the bad stuff, not the actual creators themselves. But again, that's only *most* of the time. Thanks for watching folks, and I hope you all have a good one :)
In wow. Playing in to low zones and also doing quests from low zones would do that little exp. Played since beta . The vanilla wow now is a really three times easier than it was on launch.
The 3rd segment reminded me of the final days of the original FF Online. The game was running on a very dated engine and was not getting good player numbers. As well as needed a lot of massive changes to just become a better game. So they pulled the plug. But they did so in the most spectacular way Possible, writing in that we the player characters had failed and the world was basically destroyed. A but this allowed a new one to be born from the ashes. The corpse of the very dragon that destroyed the world now a mountainous backdrop to a fortress.
As far as games go, I have always used console games and have never used any of the Live features, nor do I play computer games. I have PS 1 games from the 1990s which are original copies that are still in working order. My most recent game is Forza Horizon 2 which released in 2014
I'm pretty anti-capitalist and would like to put all of the blame on publishers, boardroom decision making, shareholders etc and while they're the main issue for mid-high budget games there's a very special villain in the creation of some games near the lower-middle budget level: the narcissistic auteur dev. Someone with enough resources, charisma, an idea with potential, luck and/or name recognition that they end up managing/abusing a small-medium team of some mix of employees, volunteers and contractors. Big points if they were part of a big, successful project and decided to strike out on their own (or got fired for being hard to work with) and try to replicate that success. A limited budget and timeframe combined with high audience expectations can easily break a dev who isn't ready or able to manage it, sometimes they make a great game despite their limitations, sometimes the position of (in reality not that much) authority can make a tyrant out of a dev who is convinced they're working on their magnum opus and will alienate everyone but yes men and people who just need the money or job experience in an already competitive field and don't feel like making waves. Imo that kind of self-indulgent development, although usually resulting in a living hell for the team putting it together, can lead to some of the most interesting games. Some end up trainwrecks full of untapped potential, some end up completely unfinished but in rare cases you get a real gem. Auteur devs are best left developing solo or having at least some higher ups to keep them in line but on the other hand that either limits the scope of the end product or limits how far they can push the envolope. What I like is seeing indie games developed by teams who are seemingly all as passionate about the end product, know their limitations and strengths and work well together. That's the ideal scenario but the bigger a team gets the more publisher interference and decisionmaking by outsiders becomes an issue. I'd love to see what a large scale game dev/publisher co-op could come up with, with AA resources and without the need to appease shareholders. Imagine a truly communal approach to AA or even AAA game development where every department's limitations are taken into account and worked around instead of either crunch or "we'll patch it later/the players will fix it with mods eventually." In the past limitations in graphics and budget have led to some of the most memorable artstyles, most people who play video games don't care if everything is as close to photorealistic as possible if the game suffers for it. Games like Underrail, which is mostly unremarkable and a bit dull visually, still have dedicated followings because of the world they created and the awesome gameplay. Hell, look at Hollow Knight!
Reminder that Scott Cawthorn has over 5 cancelled games under his name. Some of them were very ambitious but he lost his passion for them, or its development would mean sacrificing too much from his personal life. Toby Fox had thought of creating but scrapped the idea of Deltarune initially, until a few years after Undertale became big. That being said it’s also okay to revisit scrapped ideas after you scrapped them.
@@reddy64 I also remember hearing that Deltarune was literally just him hoping to create all the pretext for a mind-blowing ending to a game he experienced in a fever dream. And why Undertale was just him breaking into gamedev.
@@carso1500 there’s 5 cancelled or scrapped games: - Light From Above - Weird Colony Online - Bad Waiter Tip Calculator - FNAF 6 - FNAF Plus. But there’s also some video game lost media: - Phantom Core 2 - Weird Colony
So about those basic enemy designs in Plaza 96 and their “weird shape” that you couldn’t exactly parse. My immediate impression from seeing one of them aggro onto you from the haze of fog, I actually had a crystal clear idea of what that entity might be. “Is that a floating coffin?”
"Sometimes dreams lead you to bad places." Holy shit, I needed to hear this. A friend linked me this video, and while "sometimes you have to kill your darlings" is a lesson I've learned time and time again as a creative type of person, I'm dealing with the consequences of a dream gone wrong right now. Perspective comes from the most unlikely places. Great video - I'm a new fan!
Every day, as an artist or as a person alone with their thoughts, I have to sit down and interrogate my wishes and fears, not because they aren’t justified, but because they seem to be so on the surface when they are secretly rationalized instead. Do I want to make music, or do I really just want the community provided by copying the genre of SoundClown long enough to talk in a Discord server? Does everybody hate me, or am I projecting my self-hatred? Do I want to make the next Pokemon, or do I have problems with competitive Pokemon as an offshoot of a casual game, or problems with Game Freak, or problems with being good at competitive Pokemon? Am I rotting here in an escapist fantasy, or is this self-care? On and on, idea after idea. I could be at this forever. Or I can stop eating lotuses.
Yup. It's one of the most important things to learn as an artist. My friend took a glass blowing class in Seattle, and at the end of the 6 week course, they were all asked to present their favorite piece. Everybody thought it was to show them off, but nope. The teacher had them all bring them out back behind the shop - and smash them. She said that you should always put yourself into everything you make, but don't lose yourself in it. Art, especially glass, is impermanent and so you should never get so attached that you can't bear to see it go. It's a lesson that Chris Roberts of Star Citizen fame refuses to learn.
Working with people is hard. For a year I had a vision, but creative differences made it crumble. The other person wanted to heavily monetize it, make you pay for transferring characters and keeping them in storage, I wanted there to be a premium subscription and no character transferring fee, because that'd kill anyone's want to use the site as a character design trading alternative. Eventually everything unfurled. "That's it, is dead then" I worked on an indie movie as both an actress, sound effect recorded, and cameraman. All of my suggestions and critiques were ignored. "Maybe we should cut that scene," "that doesn't make sense, what if ?" "I can't act that out" "no, I can't film that; it's too dangerous" The project ended up worse off because no one's criticisms were listened to. I'm not saying that it would've been perfect if mine and some other people's criticisms were taken into account, but it wouldn't have been the forgettable garbage fire it was. Person leading the project was your typical spoiled white girl who refuses to listen to feedback because she is "perfect". Now I'm scared to work in groups. I don't want my ideas tampered with, I don't want my ideas silenced. I don't want my dreams mangled beyond all belief.
The systematic murder of games is something I'm very concerned about. Especially since a lot of SINGLE PLAYER GAMES (!!!) nowadays have bound themselves to a server like a lich to a phylactery, dooming them once the publisher/developer no longer deems them profitable. I know this happens mostly for Anti-cheat, e.g. with Genshin Impact, a game that's very close to my heart. I just wish, Developers would add offline functionality just in case the servers are shut down. I'd pay them full price, just so I know, my player experience can't end overnight, if someone pulls the plug on the servers. But with how things are now, I'm actually a little scared to start games like Genshin and make more memories with them, knowing that I will never ever be able to revisit them in just a few years. On the other hand, if I don't play these games now, I will never make these experiences in the first place. It's a really uncomfortable situation. 10:58 Also, please don't sell yourself short Painticus! We all know, you've played more than four games! With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it's at least five...
think a large part of the online conneciton for Genshin's also for the gatcha system. But that could still be handled fully client side for an offline variant. Just significantly increase your ablity to earn the premium currency in game and maybe bump up the odds. Set events to periodically re-run based on the system calender. And Make one last hit of profit off the paid offline version. Everyone wins, especially if they let you port progress and unlocks(especially exceptionally rare or well developed or collab units that they can't/won't rerun in the offline version)
@@deathstinger13 I'm pretty sure that's the main reason. I assume, if it was handled purely by the client side it would be significantly easier to cheat and get every character you want. However, this issue wouldn't be as significant if there was a full price offline version. However, the profit margins for Gacha are of course much higher than for full price titles...
@@LancerOfZero none of that's a issue when the main game's already hit end of life. who cares if you cheat in a single player game? You've already given them money, they're not going to be supporting or getting money from the gatcha version anyway. The whole point is this is something to do when a live service game ends service. when it stops seeing updates and is shut down. that's why this one used IDOLA and Dragalia Lost as examples of a game being lost. And X-Dive as an example of this one's idea. All three had their original Gatcha versions shut down, but X-Dive got an offline version. So again, it's a single player game that's effectively several years old that people have already dumped potentially hundreds or even thousands of dollars into each. Who CARES if you cheat? They got one last 60 buck payment from you or something. And you get a lot of good PR, including suggesting that you could do that with your next Live Service game, making people feel a little more secure in spending money on it. Plus you've already done 90% of the work, all that needs to be done is to convert the game and especially its online features to no longer need an internet connection(or do a Peer-to-Peer/fan server compatible setup for multiplayer stuff, just like in the old days). By no means easy(especially if you use spaghetti code), but a hell of a lot easier than developing a whole new game from scratch.
@@deathstinger13 I actually didn't know, there was a precedent for this. For me all of this was just wishful thinking, since I didn't assume any game companies were willing to put in the effort at the end of a game's life cycle for an offline mode that won't be particularly profitable to them. And I still think something like this will probably be the exception, not the norm. But hey, if Capcom did it, maybe other companies will too. Thanks deathstinger13 and Capcom, you've given me a bit of hope back for the future of gaming. :D
Games can literally rot btw. As a programmer, you run into issues with the systems on which the games depend to operate. MMOs that are dying lose parts of their backend server cluster and entire maps become inaccessible. Rendering APIs break covering game worlds in nearly opaque fog that was never supposed to be there. Games become unable to run due to memory leaks on modern hardware unless you degrade their quality settings so far they are unrecognizable vs their original form. Rot in technology is far more prevalent and dangerous than you have any idea. Only because of the stagnation of the x86 instruction set did we even have the ability to run many of this older PC games for so long, but with the modern push to remove x86 from the x86/64 instruction set combination much like how the 16bit instruction mod was lost in the switch to x86/64 soon decades of games will become unplayable without severe degradation. Things have gotten so strange right now it is true that Linux can play more Windows games than any one version of Windows.
Good thing that it seems like 64 is the limit of where we are going to go. It really sucks to lose built in compatibility over the years. But then again, fans saying "I'm gong to do it myself" has been the driving force in media preservation since forever.
@@lpfan4491 Yes, but it's not just bit-depth. We might be on the x86/64 instruction set but the ARM64 set is different! Plus then there's the fun of CISC vs RISC, etc.
@@Nielk1 to be fair, the x64 to arm compatibilty story is much better than the x86/64 one, with both apple and microsoft having their own layer to basically recompile the x64 instructions to arm ones
More than just that, code can rot very fucking fast if you rely on libraries, as pretty much everyone does. I use SFML and had to change quite a bit of my event handling code once in a project because of and update that changed how tracking mouse cursor location is done. Obviously, this is less likely to be an issue to consumers who get a compiled binary and don't have to deal with the compiler going "Whoops, don't know how to do that anymore", but it's a real issue. Especially if you don't use Windows, that does a lot to maintain some kind of backwards compatibility, I've noticed modern versions of certain dependencies not working for old software. Most recently, it was wanting to see how Dwarf Fortress was in 2006, but not being able to launch it because the version of SDL in the Arch repository right now has changed too much to run software reliant on it from 2006, at least on Linux. Preserving software is a very complex issue.
As a Librarian. Murder of Media/Art happens outside of games quite frequently and increasingly more often. It started with music and newspapers selling not the medium itself but only the access to them. Then movies did it aswell and now, at an alarmingly frequent rate, books/magazines and even pictures do this as well. The amount my city pays us for access to these media is now double that previously paid for physical copies. And we are only allowed to lend this copie for a specific amount of times, this is almost always lower than the amount of times a book is abel to be lend by a significant margin. And we don't even own the medium whe buy. If a e-reader producer just decides their devices don't support our files we offer, we just wasted all that money. I hate this. It's cut throat, greedy, undemocratic and abelist in my opinion and supports only the most well of people that need that access to media the least. Which is sad because it has the potential to be the opposite and have a genuine good impact for the weakest part of our community. So, that was my little librarian rant. Good video:)
How is it abelist? I can see the other ones, but not abelism. Can you explain, please? :0 (This is a genuine question. I don't mean to be rude or ignorant)
@@Twiddle_things Probably the DRM locks out access to the text by assistive technologies because that access could be repurposed to bypass copy protection.
yeah i hate it so much when im buying some medical book for school and half of stuff there is only avaible for 1 year on the site. Like if I will become doctor and dont know one specific thing after 20 years how would i look this HOW??? there should be some kind of goverment payed hackers who specialize with stealing this stuff just for curious people
@Twiddle_things we have quite many disabled customers that rely on cheap and affordable media in our library. Some of them are mentally disabled, or even just old, and struggle using technology. They however want to be up to date by reading quality news or just consume media like you and I. If publishers lock their content behind expensive technology and expensive licenses, these people can no longer access these media independently. some users may rely on affordable digital media because of impaired eyesight or similar disadvantages. At first digitalisation was a blessing for them. but now, that the price has skyrocketed and they sometimes need specific devices to access some works, they are endangered in getting locked out of the information source they so heavily rely on. both examples can't just "move on" but suffer real, excessive losses. that’s why I said it was ableist. Also, English is not my first language, so maybe there is a better word I could have used but didn’t knew.
There's a 4th type, or perhaps a 3.5 type. While 3 is deliberate removal, there's also a simple lack of restoration. Because games are seen as toys rather than art or history, they aren't preserved and archived. Companies don't make effort to Support the roms. So the game eventually becomes inaccessible, lost due to indifference.
If this was the case, we would have been much better off. It's what they said in the video about "dropping support" being used as a monicker for completely removing the titles while not letting other people tend to it. Have you seen the recent (not really) trend of people reverse engineering old games and releasing its code, so it can be freely modified and used on modern systems? Mario 64, Zelda 64, Diablo 1 to name a few. Theres ever looming danger of these projects being taken out by the developers, just like those custom WoW servers mentioned in the video. If games would be left by Companies to rot, they would be picked by community and archived, even tended to, to keep them alive. But all these operations are being actively thwarted by greedy corporations
@@Tepiloxtlno, there are plenty of games which aren't archived or documented well enough to preserve. Although not a full game, there are versions of Minecraft that have gone through this. Many versions of Minecraft just, weren't preserved, until a group of people started doing it themselves. There was even a whole discovery of a version that existed for less than a day, and they only found it because someone on twitter had it saved to an old harddrive.
@@Nullbound I was responding to the root comment, and what you say still supports what I said. If the practice was to just drop support for such versions and let it rot instead of completely purging those versions, they would still be available on Mojang servers to download I was involved in finding a bunch of mods for beta and alpha Minecraft from old hard drives and archives, I know how it looks like from that side
I'm an avid player of Honkai Star Rail. I'm also a disabled person who enjoys turn based games because I can't play fighting games because I can't see enough to be able to have a good time. I'm always painfully aware the game is server based, and one day, it will shut down. It doesn't matter that it's single player: you have to be online to play it. And I know it's probably gonna take a long time to end. It's a new game that has a lot of players, and Honkai Impact 3rd is still around, but it will happen. Yes, things have to end, but it's frankly sad that you know that it's possible to stop it from happening sooner were it not for the fact that it seems they are made to _die_ The stories, the characters... All gone. I remember the day Club Penguin shut down. And in a way I applaud the community for trying to keep it alive somehow with the copies. Of course, one of the sad parts is that it was community game for kids, and since it's not readily available to them new kids won't find it, but at least something is kept. Specially single player games shouldn't just... Die like that.
I know. I really can't stand it. Why do single player turn based RPGs have to be always online? Why? It makes no sense. It's just greedy game publishers refusing to let go of control because of a false fear of piracy. Piracy is a non-issue, but these companies push DRM to keep an iron grip. The media you buy isn't even yours. You're paying to rent it from them.
As also another Honkai player, really should not be legal for companies to release these kinds of games without updating them to run offline and unlocking everything once servers shut down imo
Plaza 96 actually reminds me of an experience I had with an MMO recently: ABSOLVER. I had actually beaten the game already - about a year before I had this experience - but I wanted to play it again so I could pop some achievements. I made a new save, and a new character, I sped through the tutorial, and got into the free-roam section of the game. There were three people online. Not in one area. Not even in my REGION, to my understanding. Possibly just on ps4 (the console I had the game on), but something tells me I wouldn't have found many more people if I checked on my pc. As far as I was concerned, there were the only people playing at all. One of them was at a save station, completely AFK. Characters turn to stone when you do this, so I couldn't attack or interact with them. Another was in the coliseum, where the first real boss fight of the game happens. There were up on top of the thing, and I spent a few minutes trying to get up there. I think they got bored of waiting, and just left. I didn't even see the other one. Ever. I closed the game pretty shortly after, and haven't opened the game since. I sometimes think about trying it again, but somehow I get the feeling it'd only be me this time.
what are you yappin about it feels like absolver came out in the recent modern era (it definitely did??) and it wasn't that popular online on any platform beyond launch. Like... okay? It's not creepy or weird that there's a handful of ppl playing an aging and already-unpopular game and it's also not an mmo (petty addition)
@@Imperial_Lizardgirl For me it's Story of Seasons. You need the multiplayer mode to get your wool, milk, etc to max quality, but it's impossible to do that now. Absolutely NO ONE is playing the game, and you're left in the queue for multiplayer mode indefinitely. You literally can't complete the game now because of it. It's just another victim of the overhyped multiplayer boom of the 2000s.
@@WobblesandBean iirc Rune Factory 1 had this problem as well, it's impossible to marry one bachelorette because she requires an item quality impossible to obtain without trading to increase its level.
A game isn't really archived, until it's source code and assets are archived with documentation. A game binary isn't useful without the OS, it's stack, dependencies, and so on. If you have the source code, you can compile it or at least convert it to something that can be compiled. Until then, it remains ephemeral.
Recompiling isn't a magic panacea, though. Games are often deeply tied to the game engines they use, and those are deeply tied to the hardware and OS stacks that they're built for, and those are evolving not just in the details but in fundamental concepts of how they work. Porting the sources to something newer can mean that you have to completely understand how the sources worked on the old machine, and then re-design the low-level parts of it to work the same way on a new machine -- and that can be as much work as writing the game was in the first place. Including requiring you to redo a lot of the QA work, because game software is probably not going to come with unit tests to tell you if you translated it correctly. It turns out that writing an emulator that can run an already-compiled game binary -- perhaps with some automatic translation of the machine code -- is often the easier project. (Source: Worked in a large company porting our codebase to a different CPU type. And this wasn't game software or an operating-system change; it was just server-side code, and we were using the same Linux version on both. It was still a many-people many-year project.)
@@BrooksMoses internet user discovers why programming is a valued job also "until it's source code and assets are archived with documentation" internet user discovers how to read the last two words of a sentence
on the abandonment part it's interesting to note that one of the major organizers of the haunted PS1 demo disc's own project "Sauna Simulator" has been in development hell
That remake makes no sense set in 1993, DOOM was the shooters we had in 1993 not fully 3D rendered shooters. 1998 I could understand but under no circumstances would I ever believe that game was being played in 1993
Yeah, I don't know why these dudes are so stubborn about the time setting. It completely destroys all semblance of realism and immersion for me, which is a shame, because the remake looks authentic in every other way. I was there, that fake web forum and browser game was spot on for the era.
man, the outro section hits hard, especially the line going along the words of "always-online games will die because the developers deliberately kill them off" pso2 is a game i hold so dear to me yet it got f%%king annihilated by pso2 ngs, a much more inferior version of a phantasy star game that fails to deliver on every front it's technically on life support, just to probably prevent private servers from popping up
Really, the big reason the big corpos want to stop you from playing [old product] is because you're playing [old product] instead of [new product]. They want everyone to just move over to (and pay for) [new product] because it is the pricier option, even if it sucks.
They can't sell loot boxes to someone still playing the Black Ops 2 multiplayer and they're probably still kicking themselves very violently for making it P2P hosted.
This was an amazing video. I also wish that "agony of a dying MMO" actually touched on that topic. As a huge MMO player, I've seen a few MMO deaths in my time. Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 & 2, City of Heroes (I know it's back but it was gone for a LONG while and only came back because of the weirdest drama I've ever seen), Wildstar. There's this... immense amount of dread and despair you feel in an MMO's final days. Everyone is pretty low energy. Everyone both wants to do content, but also not. Scared of missing... something if they leave the lobbies/player towns. It feels kinda dumb to do a dungeon run or do a raid. You feel more productive, more meaning, out of sitting around the same corner of the city you always do and talking to friends. The pressure of the deadline coming closer and closer. No one wants to think about, but it's all anyone can talk about. It's like death, real death, in that sense, but in a much smaller dose. Some people throw little parties to celebrate the time they had, others gather around and say their goodbyes. Some people call out in global chat "THANK YOU DEV TEAM" and others cry "DON'T DO THIS". The end is usually never much. I can only think of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 as an exception to the rule but a majority of the time when the clock hits 0, there's no fanfare. Just a disconnect error, and it's over. Gone. Snuffed out. All you feel like doing is sit in your chair and wonder "now what?" MMO death feels a lot different than other games. With other live service games it just feels like any other day. I've basically learned to not attach myself to any of these things because I know they can end just as quick as they start. With MMO's it's a lot. There was a lot of time there, there was a world there, and it's just... gone.
I have something to throw in the ring: my experiences with Asheron’s Call. I grew up alongside the game with my parents being avid players. When I was old enough, I joined them. My mom left for WoW and my time with it grew spottier and spottier with my Dad until it went free to play with the last content update in 2014, but really that should have been our first big warning that the end was nigh. It wasn’t even three years later that Warner Brothers pulled the string on the puppet Turbine had become that threw the switch to shut the servers down. You can look up the dismay, the sadness people felt as a nearly twenty year old game world was reduced to mere memories before their eyes. The playerbase was promised an official toolkit for private servers that mysteriously never materialized and then radio silence became the order of the day. When we heard it was all shutting down suddenly interest rekindled in old server emulator projects and there was a mad dash to capture as much data as possible via packet captures to reconstruct as much as we could one day. A while after shutdown there was an experimental emulator being worked on that showed lots of promise. Characters already in the world, working collision. Rudimentary combat and loot mechanics working. There was some rumbling about it making use of some leaked source and debug data from a few years after launch, just before the last expansion dropped, but I don’t recall if those claims were ever substantiated. Apparently it was enough for WB to twist the knife and send a cease and desist to the developer that was primarily working on it. Thankfully he open sourced it and then went dark rather than let all of his work go to waste. Officially his source code just leaked. Unofficially we’re all pretty sure it was some kind of figurative dead man’s switch. These days there’s a much more mature codebase people use instead, but it was the first emulator to hit playable status, and is the one all the “classic” forks of the game mainly use since the alleged leaked data was from about the timeframe these projects tend to want to emulate.
Hey, Painticus, I've been watching your content on and off for a little while now, but even if it doesn't come from "your biggest fan" or anything like that, I feel like someone has to say this. Thank you, sincerely, I never had the chance to play The Crew (what living in a third world country does to a mf) despite my efforts otherwise, and the very possibility of that to never change is scary, to be locked out of experiencing not only The Crew as a game, but to set precedent for hundreds of other games to simply end, no matter how much the community behind it would support it. It's heartwarming to see the message spread, especially from someone who seems as passionate as you about keeping games alive and breathing. I don't know how to properly end this, so, instead, you can have a second Thank you. (killer vid btw loved it)
In addition to Silent Hills being a dead game, PT is interestingly two types of dead game at once. First it's a murdered game, but more interestingly it's a completed ARG. PT was a walking simulator horror game, a teaser for Silent Hills, and an ARG that tied those two aspects together. An ARG is a type of game that dies in a very unusual way since it becomes truly impossible to play, by their nature they're playable for a limited time, they're a puzzle that can only be solved once, and all they leave behind is the forum posts, the discussions, and the memories of them.
Wait, I remember Creepy Gaming covered Silent Hills back when it came off the PS store, but never heard of this ARG of it. Could you provide more info?
about the "kill your dreams" part: i'm so fucking tired of doing exactly that. either for one reason or another i've seen all of my fucking dreams die, or be realized in my stead, never done myself with my own two hands. i'm tired of doing that.
it's a hard thing to balance, in my experience it's not only having a realistic dream, but also having a realistic plan to get to said dream. I'm trying to become a commercial pilot and at first that task seems very daunting, after all you need a lot of time money and be able to understand the knowledge they give you. For many, this seems borderline impossible and for the few remaining they jump into it with the idea of "i'll figure it out as i go" which leads to many failing. From i've learned becoming a pilot, you have to not only have a plan, but also be out in the community as many people irl want to see you succeed ( as much as we're lead to believe otherwise) and are willing to give you a helping hand or pointers towards scholarships, training opportunities, or just act as an overall mentor. I hope this helps and whatever you peruse, I hope you can take this to heart.
It's ok to mourn the direction you thought your life would go in. I was supposed to be an artist, a performer, a musician. But none of those things panned out. But life goes on, it HAS to. We don't have a choice. You have to find new meaning, because otherwise, you will waste your finite time on this earth being bitter over the stuff you didn't do.
We exist in a world where we are told to dream and shoot for the stars when all most can realistically expect us a day job and getting by moment by moment. A small population of people live life lavishly or have the kind of jobs and work that fulfills them, but sadly most of us can only afford to survive. All the dreams I had died and I'm just trying to find motivation to work a job because I'd be content rotting away in a hole or some abandoned shack somewhere.
You and several other people here need therapy. As someone who actually GOES to therapy, that isn't meant to be belittling, getting actual outside help is genuinely life-changing...even if there's no reliable way I know of to find professionals who actually know what they're doing, so it can take a few tries. Unfortunately. A lot of us face more obstacles than we realize. So many of us that think we're lazy or useless are just playing life in handicap mode, because of problems like ADHD or depression. It doesn't have to be like that forever, though. This coming from someone who feels the same way, like a huge part of my life has been wasted failing to accomplish the things I really wanted to do...but not anymore.
There is one more type of game death you didnt cover, which i call "sickness". This is when a game slowly but surely is killed by an outside force with the only goal of destroying it. Be it through hacking or simply by spamming bots, this more recent type of game death can be seen in games like TF2 and Counterstrike. These games arent dead yet, but they are dying, very, very slowly.
there was a gamejam specifically about making a demo for a game to leave unfinished. exact rules is making a bare bones tech demo to demonstrate basic gameplay. one of my favorite games is from it
I remember there was an experience on Roblox called Super Paper Mario RP, it was built almost exactly like the popular deltarune one you can find today. When I was younger I used to hop on that experience to explore the beautifully crafted map, with areas built so true to the games it was like they plucking them straight out of the games themselves. Then Nintendo mass removed games themed of their franchisees off Roblox. Unsurprising that experience was one of them. Last year I went on to see if I could find it and explore it like I did years prior, but unsurprisingly, it was gone. There was a similar scare recently with Nintendo possibly removing the Nintendo themed content off the Gmod workshop. A lot of things we grew up on for years, even if each individual to ourselves, is sadly capable of being removed in less than a day all thanks to a couple peices of paperwork. Its really sad to see.
Bro I fuckin' played on that game near constantly as a kid. Met one of my best friends that I still have only the fondest memories of on there. I remember they even kept adding in things from other Mario games in the Paper Mario style, like the Observatory from Super Mario Galaxy lovingly recreated in the Paper Mario style. Was goddamn epic. I felt a small part of me die when one day it just suddenly disappeared without rhyme or reason. Must've been around 2 years of my childhood just gone, for no reason seemingly. I only discovered what happened using this damn comment and while I would be outraged if it was still me back then, but now? I just feel empty because this is about what I expect from Nintendo now.
@lixix1337 yea it was devastating to see that it was gone, a lot of work was put into it it must have really hurt for the creator to lose all that work in a day or so.
@imadrian98 yeah I know that, that's why I said it was a scare and not an actual thing, but because of how Nintendo is it was definitely very believable.
I was playing gmod right when that happened and seeing the "fuck you copyright" creations that popped up on the workshop, and people uploading more nintendo stuff out of sheer spite, was extremely funny to me.
Autogeny could also be connected to how various pagan gods and spiritual figures became re-contextualized as demons or spirits in folklore, bringing new life from the corpses of old gods
There's also those rare and wonderful cases like what we saw with City of Heroes, where eventually the biggest private server (and most accurate to what once was) finally got licensing rights from the previous publisher. They've been thriving, even. And to cap it off, they've added all sorts of things back into the game, using discarded assets and scrapped ideas for power sets and archetypes! It's rare that it works out like this. But when it does? The results can be brilliant.
@Painticus This doesn't even include games that ended when they were 'beaten', like Tower of Dragua: The Recovery of Babylim. It ended when the final boss, Dragua, was defeated. That was over a decade ago.
i've been thinking of how all of Little Big Planet's servers are officially dead as of this year. It's pretty heartbreaking, even if you can still play the offline versions of these games
THere is a thing about game death if it comes to multiplayer games- it's in a certain way natural. It's not just about "grass is greener somewhere else" but about the always multiplayer game getting old and loosing it's playabilty, especially when people leave to play something else. In no hidden way- singleplayer games can live with a small playerbase, multiplayer ones cannot, and accepting it is the healthy way- otherwise you get corpses forced to live in forme of "live service games" which force new unfitting clothes on a body they do not fit.
I’m in school for library science (specifically archival preservation) and there’s actually a HUGE convo in the community right now around how we can work to digitally preserve games. (especially those who were abandoned or technically lost due to no way to play them beyond “pirated” ports) It’s quite intriguing and lot of people are becoming very passionate about preserving such an important piece of gaming and internet history. Of course, theres a lot of questions relating to avoiding legal battles and saving the code that is decaying still so it’s a big process
Yo that is so cool! I didn't know that about Pagan! I now imagine a game that uses LOD models to show the deterioration of game assets. HMMMMMmmmmm. I gotta stop, I don't need a 6th game project right now.
It's such an interesting game! I recommend watching Painticus' two videos on it if you can't find the time to play - there's a lot of cool stuff in there
it does make me sad that yoy didn't talk about Agony Of A Dying MMO, since not many have actually done this whatsoever, like, no one has talked in length about it here, and I was sooo excited bc of the genuine passion you put in when you really want to delve into a topic.... but I get it >_< This was an amazing video either way!! :3
About the third part, while I mostly agree, I think is important to look beyond the "hurr durr women" people and see the real problem behind that specific stuff, that is that is not devs making this desicions, but company meetings and market studies. There's already almost no sincerity behind AAA games (beyond some exceptions) so these games trying to appeal to minorities in such a cookie cutter way is honestly very, very tiresome. As some lad in twitter once said "Look for representation from your peers, not companies", no committee will ever compare to individual experiences. Also I know the video is old but Pirate Software has a video about the problems with SKG proposed implementation that, imo, is worth a watch. Anyway, good video, tbh the concept of a simulation of a game being shut down through the lens of internet culture is really interesting, wish we could get more of that, specially with how relevant it has become post- covid.
Not sure what FPS map I would bound my soul to, but I can think of maps that I’d definitely do not want to be bound to: 2fort Hydro 5-D Space Snowbound Derelict Chiron TL 34 Nuketown
Whenever I hear some reactionary complain about how gaming is a dying industry, I have to think back on when I was very young and playing the official How to Train Your Dragon MMO. They "ended support" for that game years ago and I can never revisit it, and the only thing I have to remember any of it is my very small memories and the fan wiki. The game you love will not die because you have to choose some pronouns. The game you love will die when they see no value in it anymore.
@@techwizsmith7963 It was honestly one of my favorite mmos, but I feel like not enough people remember it for there to even be an attempted revival project
Where were you when club penguin die? apolgy for bad english it is my first languagen’t where were you when club pengin die i was at house eating dorito when phone ring “club pengin is kil” “no” Also the Scratches OST caught me off guard at around 14:38 major nostalgia hit.
So, I'm curious. Since the actually murder of game's were discussed, and how gave devs will kill their game out of capitalistic greed, what about the other type of murder for videogames? Outside forces making a game unplayable, to force people to stop having fun, and therefore leave. I'm curious about if anyone has tried to capture this, since it's such a rare and brutal death. The only games that come to my mind for this type of death are many io games that are ruined by cheaters, and the current attempted murder of Team Fortress 2.
As someone who has started and abandoned many projects, some I've worked 5+ years on, it's really refreshing to hear someone say that sometimes, you have to kill a project. You can't keep pushing something that just isn't working, and I think more artists need to hear this. GREAT video btw.
I unfortunately have a constant deal-in with code falling apart due to updates and whatnot, but with a few patches here and there, it gets the job usually fixed. I'm randomly spouting all of this because it's a scary thing to have happen and I'm glad somebody else covered this. Thank you.
wow i went to sub at the end of the video and figured you were a channel with at least 100k!! i love how you presented this. as someone who dabbles in creative hobbies, i particularly loved the section about how projects will inevitably be abandoned or destroyed, but rot is simply part of rebirth. rly resonated with me. awesome video, hope to see more from you
I feel like its important to punctuate the point made in "No Players Online" with another: you can't let that truth in creativity stop you. Sure, maybe what you want to make it won't, can't or shouldn't be made, but you can't let that paralyze you. You won't know what your idea will fall into until you try. Just pick up what you learned from what couldn't be finished and carry it to the next. Until you find the idea that does bloom😊
THANK YOU for calling out the absolutely absurd VHS nonsense on No Players Online, it's awful, it's completely anachronistic, it doesnt work, and the dev is old enough to know better or just look it up. when the updated version was posted to Alpha Beta Gamer recently the comment section ripped it apart for this. and ABG tried to posit that the devs are in fact trying to do something interesting with it but like you, i absolutely DO NOT buy it, it doesn't work. the new demo DOES still have the VHS artifacting and anachronisms though, unless ABG was playing a different version than you were
I love the fact that you talk about Pagan: Autogeny so much but have something different to say about it each time. You could do a Pagan analysis channel at this rate. Also it's weirdly ironic that you never ended up fully talking about Agony Of A Dying MMO. I agree it doesn't really match the section you originally picked it for, although it is still a fascinating story experience that really had me intrigued all the way through and it would have been interesting to get your thoughts on that. But what's ironic is that this is also a demo for a full game that we haven't see any update for in ages. I genuinely don't know if the project is still going or not, I'm hoping it is but as you pointed out yourself it's unfortunately very common for demos like this to never become full games.
rotting code to me brings a game called Il-2 1946 to mind. an old flight simulator still available for purchase. if its code was subject to rot, then it is strewn with black mold and its foundations are cracked and ruined. it is a beautiful, well crafted castle long forgotten by its lord, yet still lived in by its tenants, desperately keeping it from collapsing.
The modders have put so much effort in to it that is something far beyond what could ever be achieved otherwise. That said the foundation is still cracked nonetheless, after all the first edition is now 22 years old. One could wonder what they could do instead of they made a remake of it instead, not that that is going to happen. Then is the fact that nothing really has replaced the niche in combat sims that it filled. IL-2 GB just can't handle the same mission sizes so it limits possibilities in that regard.
That third one. That's not new. It's a blatant form of engineered obsolescence. When you want players to play your new game, you kill the previous one, so they have to keep paying for a replacement. I heard talk of a second gaming crash. Shit like this, this is what'll cause it. First it will be games, and then the means to make them. Unity tried, and it nearly killed them. I've even read rumors of Microsoft eyeing Valve. Imagine, the entire steam library, filled with games you can't get anywhere else anymore. Ransomed. Gone. Made way for new Vanishware that they can charge $100 for, because too many fucking people will buy it because it has Ninja's or some shit.
I'd like to say I can't believe in a crash with indie doing as well as it is, but even indie is attracting money men in those oxymoron "indie publishers" like Devolver or tinyBuild. The exact kind of people killing AAA. Let's just hope they all go bankrupt soon and artists can get in control of making art again.
This video was extremely touching and a wonderful analysis of what i love so much about video games. people's ability to come together and create something, even for a moment, has always fascinated me. I really hope to see your channel blow up because this content is incredibly entertaining and wonderfully retrospective
it's especially frustrating since one of the most profitable genre of games right now is especially vulnerable to that last cause of death; Gatcha games. While yes, some may decry them as P2W low effort trash, and many are, several are still very solid games with dedicated fanbases. Games like Genshin Impact, Honkai impact 3rd and Star Rail, Epic 7, and more all have large player bases that dump in huge amounts of money. but one day, it'll all just...vanish. Too many go the route of Dragalia Lost or IDOLA A Phantasy Star Saga; vanishing at EOL. Along with all the progress and effort and purchases made. Too few take the path Megaman X-Dive took, developing an offline version so that the game itself could live on in some small form. The ideal would be a standalone that lets you port over your progress and unlocks, maybe supporting PTP connectivity to maintain at least some of the online content, but otherwise everything handled client-side. Have the game automatically re-run events periodically. Maybe you couldn't redo most collab events, but fully in-house events, or cross-game events all owned by the same company should be fine.
Thing about gacha games is, by all accounts, the simple inclusion of that design element is intentionally hanging the reaper over it. If anything, I feel like people are more justified with the annoyance at their existence despite any sort of good gameplay it might have elsewhere. Gacha mechanics do not give a game any sort of beneficial player impact and just put an excessive amount of pressure on its existence as if the game doesn't turn out to be the second coming of Christ then an expiration date is all but guaranteed for it.
This video has been stuck in my recommended for 2 weeks in my sidebar when I watch other videos, and I thought it was just you playing that cursed CTF game everyone was playing a few weeks ago. Nope, it's a much better video than that. Subbed.
Something a friend of mine told me about is a type of game he absolutely refuses to interact with, and it specifically involves the exact types of games that are even capable of dying in the first place. He doesn't even like to call them "games", he calls them "events" because they're almost reveling in their temporary nature with online-only and constantly changing via updates. In a way, games lose a part of themselves with every patch, even if people believe it's for the better that's still an experience that can never be played again.
this is way too underrated for the actual quality, message and how well this works. i may be a bit biased but i love videos and video essays about this type of stuff. where games arent just programs made for entertainment but so much more. its more than signals of electricity, its the time the people who shed tears, sweat and blood spent to make it, so you can enjoy it. its more than just "a game" its (as cringy as it may sound) an experience. and being forgotten or just ending is so tragic to the game, its fans and the developers who made it. even if its parts may be reused and the devs move on to make a sequel or something new, something many people loved and played everyday has just become a memory
In regards to the talk about exploring empty MMOs I’ve actually seen another UA-camr, Josh Strife Hayes, do this. He usually reviews older, obscure, or poorly reviewed MMOs on his channel. One of the MMOs he checked out was called Otherland. It was empty, with himself as genuinely the only person on the server (before some of his viewers joined in), but he thought the visuals were unique and beautiful and when he checked the achievements he came up with the goal of trying to become the top player by collecting the rarest achievement before the shutdown. It’s a 10 part series with each part lasting roughly 40 to 50 minutes.
Great analysis, loved it. Came across your channel recently and immediately watched pretty much every video. Nice to come across a channel that hasn't drank any of the various flavours of outrage kool-aid doing the rounds today.
City of Heroes is a rare case of a killed game returning to life... but it wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't broken 'the rules'. One of the developers had secretly leaked the back end info that was necessary to make it actually run. The server side data, that is. And a private server had quietly run in secrecy for years. Once the whistle was finally blown on it, the company that owned the IP could have killed it again... but they didn't. I think it was due to all the bad press they got for killing it the first time. Either way, the server was left to quietly run... and tentatively people running it reached out to the company to get some kind of arrangement working. Surprisingly, and thankfully, it kind of worked. Now they're allowed to take donations for server costs, and they've started continuing active development. All of this could have just been avoided, though... if the company had allowed the game to go on maintenance mode to begin with, or if they'd sold it to one of the numerous buyers.
The ending made me want to print the code of my projects out so I could hug the broken mess of shoddy design... A better death indeed, for at least I learned and saw some wild bugs.
Came for the video premise, stuck around because you have a phenominal voice for this kind of content, and subbed for your based takes at the end. Great video!
You said you've made at least one person cry early in this video and reaching the latter half of it I want to say you can now make that two. Great video of course,
I will forever be bitter about the fall of City of Heroes and ArcheAge. The players raised up money to straight up BUY CoH from the publishers, but nope, they shelved it instead. And ArcheAge.....most hyped game, extremely popular, killed by greed. Fuckin' travesty. There's ones like Secret World too, not 'dead', but zombified for sure.
The little political tangent kinda felt like it came out of nowhere, only things I myself am mad at is all the unnecessary censorship that soilless corporations want to force on video games into order to net more profit. Video games are art and censorship of art, ANY ART FOR ANY REASON is something that should be fought against.
This is the first video of yours I've seen and my guy, that ending rant has earned my subscription, my comment and my like. Fuck the concept of "not owning anything". I don't play online games? I play single player only, but for those games I love - I download the installers, I back them up on external hard drives, hell if theyre exclusively on Steam I pirate them if it'll get me an installation file. Fuck that corpo BS, when I buy media? I'm fucking *keeping* that media.
The third and final type, there may still be SOME hope. Postal 2 was dead because of a random Russian authentication server being shut down, but fans managed to spoof it for play. Battleborn died an ignominious death in the shadow of Overwatch, but one fan is meticulously reverse-engineering the codebase itself to make it playable and sharing this new installer IN THE OFFICIAL DISCORD SERVER. Playstation Home, a free app most people never even installed, is slowly coming back to life thanks to the work of diligent archivists at Destination Home and people volunteering all of the data on their PS3 hard drives. There is some hope for some dead games.
_video games_ have never had it better _gaming_ peaked in the 00s The hobby is harmed by dilution of experience with too many expensive, low quality titles and predatory business practices. Gamers tolerate this because logically things are going well and because we remember when it felt that way too. That's why the zeitgeist claims that gaming has gone bad, because there is a cognitive dissonance between the hobby's current potential for enjoyment and the realized disappointment. Personally, I think it's ropegut; that feeling of pleasurable anxiety at the top of a hill or rollercoaster where you feel like you'll fly away were it not for your guts tying you down. The video games hobby has so much inertia as it rises and it's time to split it into various other hobbies. Retro, emulators, RPGs, MMOs, etc. it's time to start choosing what _kind_ of gamer you are; the hobby as a whole is too broad now to please everyone as what was once a cannonball now rains down as grapeshot. We had to do it with books and with film too.
I think a great game that represents the third part of this video is Shipwrecked 64. Spoilers, but it does involve a decently known studio having their game killed by a corporation. Its a fantastic game even beyond that theme of "Murder", especially with other kinds of murder.
Physical decay of a game is fairly terrifying if it happens unexpectedly especially since it’s signalling something is going something wrong you can’t repair. My save of saints row 3 bugged out and broke vehicles and pedestrians in a bizarre way but only sometimes, to keep it unexpected. Then you think, can I fix this, will it eventually ruin everything? That serves to ultimately undermine the main experience and add a weird layer of dread or sadness over the game, especially when it’s supposed to be a light hearted experience.
I think he was trying to say that those specific parts worked well but the "dying game" narrative wasn't as applicable as, say, a dying forum or something
This video was fucking poetry, man. I will not restrain myself in saying that you absolutely cooked up with this script. Additionally, that thing about "abandoning a project is not bad, it's necessary" is the EXACT thing that I needed to hear as a music producer in this early, troublesome stage of my career. Really good video overall, thanks for this one.
There's currently no better example of a rotting and decaying game like Team Fortress 2. The game has been around for over 15 years now, and the devs of the game seem to disregard it's current state of affairs. Because of this, the game is infested with bots of various kind and more importantly swarmed by cheaters and hackers who do nothing but engage in acts of dishonesty and childish behavior that further buries the game. From all of this, new experiences are obtained from a game that is indeed currently rotting - But I think that access to interaction is dwindling. I wish at this point Valve would either kill TF2 outright, so it can finally die, or adapt it to more modern sensibilities and actually see continued support and effort. It is agonizing to see it in this state of perpetual limbo - unable to die, just existing in this constant decaying state. Anyway, loved the vid, thanks for the watch
I'd argue the hyper competitive video game industry of today IS a bad thing - it's forcing a kind of stagnancy as devs increasingly refuse to try new things. Also please stop showing me WoW footage, you'll make me relapse.
Pirates Online went offline in 2013, and it was brought back by fans under the name "Legend of Pirates Online." Thankfully, Disney hasn't made any effort to shut it down, and it still has a couple hundred people playing on a given day. I've thought about giving it a shot, because I loved Pirates Online as a kid, and I was sad to see it go.
"I don't know what kind of shape they are, but it seems like the kind of thing a D&D enthusiast just kind of owns" HI, D&D ENTHUSIAST HERE, that looks like it could be a d8! Not sure how well it would roll tho
I like to think that the flying weird geometric shapes in Pagan: Autogeny are actually characters whose textures colapsed into their hitboxes after they realised their hitboxes were the real them.
Wow, I remember watching that original video on Pagan: Autogeny. Is it really five years old? Your video (and narration) quality has dramatically improved and become much more stylized since then. Great video as always, Paint. Been thinking about this a lot lately with the increasing "games as a service" model and so on.
I think No Players Online is even sadder because the exact type of game death the game is about happened to the developers with their next project Spookware, it's a game that will forever sit at half complete, despite how much obvious love went into the project.
Imagine exploring a virtual cyberscape in cyberspace and finding essentially a digital ecosystem that... actually, it looks like the ecosystems of realspace. Various rotting games have been turned into nutrition for "fungal games" and such. Codes forming tall trees, softwares forming fauna, etc. If exploration of ACTUAL cyberspace becomes possible in the future, THAT would be an interesting way of depicting it all...
@@LordTrashcanRulez cyberpunk 2077 heavily dropped the ball, at least at launch. It took a while for the game to be ‘complete.’ Resident Evil, at least from what I’ve seen of the last two games, not including remakes/remasters, they seemed to have knocked it outta the park.. not heard much about the new Star Wars games, as holy shit, the shitshow that’s been Star Wars for years at this point.. yakuza seems somehow fine.
I feel like the game "Hyponospace Outlaw" fits PERFECTLY into this categorization of games. Strangely, I've never seen anyone talking about it despite how much I enjoyed my play through of it. If you have the time, I'd absolutely recommend playing it. It's only a few hours long, and unlike these other games, you, the player witness the program while its active, through its downfall, and then the restoration efforts years afterwards. I won't spoil the game, it's significantly better to just experience blind.
Things progress over time, but I actually like how sounded in that 5 year old video. The you from 5 years ago sounds like a dude in his first week on the job and the you now sounds like someone who's ran the gauntlet and got the scars to prove it. That's what growth is.
Hi everyone! Just want to jump in and make a quick clarification - in the third section of the video I use the phrase "game developers" a lot, when something like "game companies" would be more apt. It's usually (but not always!) the publishers rather than the developers that do the bad stuff, not the actual creators themselves. But again, that's only *most* of the time.
Thanks for watching folks, and I hope you all have a good one :)
In wow. Playing in to low zones and also doing quests from low zones would do that little exp. Played since beta . The vanilla wow now is a really three times easier than it was on launch.
The 3rd segment reminded me of the final days of the original FF Online. The game was running on a very dated engine and was not getting good player numbers. As well as needed a lot of massive changes to just become a better game.
So they pulled the plug.
But they did so in the most spectacular way Possible, writing in that we the player characters had failed and the world was basically destroyed.
A but this allowed a new one to be born from the ashes.
The corpse of the very dragon that destroyed the world now a mountainous backdrop to a fortress.
As far as games go, I have always used console games and have never used any of the Live features, nor do I play computer games. I have PS 1 games from the 1990s which are original copies that are still in working order. My most recent game is Forza Horizon 2 which released in 2014
@@alephnole7009 it's hilarious that they tried to subtlety blame the player base for the failures of the devs/upper management
I'm pretty anti-capitalist and would like to put all of the blame on publishers, boardroom decision making, shareholders etc and while they're the main issue for mid-high budget games there's a very special villain in the creation of some games near the lower-middle budget level: the narcissistic auteur dev. Someone with enough resources, charisma, an idea with potential, luck and/or name recognition that they end up managing/abusing a small-medium team of some mix of employees, volunteers and contractors. Big points if they were part of a big, successful project and decided to strike out on their own (or got fired for being hard to work with) and try to replicate that success.
A limited budget and timeframe combined with high audience expectations can easily break a dev who isn't ready or able to manage it, sometimes they make a great game despite their limitations, sometimes the position of (in reality not that much) authority can make a tyrant out of a dev who is convinced they're working on their magnum opus and will alienate everyone but yes men and people who just need the money or job experience in an already competitive field and don't feel like making waves. Imo that kind of self-indulgent development, although usually resulting in a living hell for the team putting it together, can lead to some of the most interesting games. Some end up trainwrecks full of untapped potential, some end up completely unfinished but in rare cases you get a real gem. Auteur devs are best left developing solo or having at least some higher ups to keep them in line but on the other hand that either limits the scope of the end product or limits how far they can push the envolope. What I like is seeing indie games developed by teams who are seemingly all as passionate about the end product, know their limitations and strengths and work well together. That's the ideal scenario but the bigger a team gets the more publisher interference and decisionmaking by outsiders becomes an issue. I'd love to see what a large scale game dev/publisher co-op could come up with, with AA resources and without the need to appease shareholders. Imagine a truly communal approach to AA or even AAA game development where every department's limitations are taken into account and worked around instead of either crunch or "we'll patch it later/the players will fix it with mods eventually." In the past limitations in graphics and budget have led to some of the most memorable artstyles, most people who play video games don't care if everything is as close to photorealistic as possible if the game suffers for it. Games like Underrail, which is mostly unremarkable and a bit dull visually, still have dedicated followings because of the world they created and the awesome gameplay. Hell, look at Hollow Knight!
Wait, if games get murdered, but people over the internet keeps reviving them, are they... Web Necromancers?
Dayum son.
we can get more creative than that; how about necrotechs
*techpriests*
@@kaden-sd6vb all praise the omnissiah
Techromancers
@@kyrazz128 Everything leads back to 40K
runescape survived game death, came back and killed its successor
Runescape is a Revenant!
@@catgckool428 OSRS ITS ETERNAL
As did Team Fortress 2.
@@asteroidrulesand now it’s being murdered.
What was its successor?
Reminder that Scott Cawthorn has over 5 cancelled games under his name. Some of them were very ambitious but he lost his passion for them, or its development would mean sacrificing too much from his personal life.
Toby Fox had thought of creating but scrapped the idea of Deltarune initially, until a few years after Undertale became big. That being said it’s also okay to revisit scrapped ideas after you scrapped them.
fnaf was meant to end at fnaf 3 but he kept on going
i remember hearing that undertale was practice for creating deltarune
@@reddy64 I also remember hearing that Deltarune was literally just him hoping to create all the pretext for a mind-blowing ending to a game he experienced in a fever dream.
And why Undertale was just him breaking into gamedev.
What are those 5 games that Scott cancelled and where they before or after FNAF?
@@carso1500 there’s 5 cancelled or scrapped games:
- Light From Above
- Weird Colony Online
- Bad Waiter Tip Calculator
- FNAF 6
- FNAF Plus.
But there’s also some video game lost media:
- Phantom Core 2
- Weird Colony
So about those basic enemy designs in Plaza 96 and their “weird shape” that you couldn’t exactly parse. My immediate impression from seeing one of them aggro onto you from the haze of fog, I actually had a crystal clear idea of what that entity might be.
“Is that a floating coffin?”
It reminds me of the graphics from Asheron's Call. Buncha blocky bois going at one another.
"Sometimes dreams lead you to bad places." Holy shit, I needed to hear this. A friend linked me this video, and while "sometimes you have to kill your darlings" is a lesson I've learned time and time again as a creative type of person, I'm dealing with the consequences of a dream gone wrong right now. Perspective comes from the most unlikely places.
Great video - I'm a new fan!
i think they're called nightmares
Every day, as an artist or as a person alone with their thoughts, I have to sit down and interrogate my wishes and fears, not because they aren’t justified, but because they seem to be so on the surface when they are secretly rationalized instead. Do I want to make music, or do I really just want the community provided by copying the genre of SoundClown long enough to talk in a Discord server? Does everybody hate me, or am I projecting my self-hatred? Do I want to make the next Pokemon, or do I have problems with competitive Pokemon as an offshoot of a casual game, or problems with Game Freak, or problems with being good at competitive Pokemon? Am I rotting here in an escapist fantasy, or is this self-care? On and on, idea after idea.
I could be at this forever.
Or I can stop eating lotuses.
Yup. It's one of the most important things to learn as an artist. My friend took a glass blowing class in Seattle, and at the end of the 6 week course, they were all asked to present their favorite piece. Everybody thought it was to show them off, but nope. The teacher had them all bring them out back behind the shop - and smash them. She said that you should always put yourself into everything you make, but don't lose yourself in it. Art, especially glass, is impermanent and so you should never get so attached that you can't bear to see it go.
It's a lesson that Chris Roberts of Star Citizen fame refuses to learn.
@@lancesmith8298 how do you tell the difference between an escapist fantasy and self care?
Working with people is hard. For a year I had a vision, but creative differences made it crumble. The other person wanted to heavily monetize it, make you pay for transferring characters and keeping them in storage, I wanted there to be a premium subscription and no character transferring fee, because that'd kill anyone's want to use the site as a character design trading alternative. Eventually everything unfurled.
"That's it, is dead then"
I worked on an indie movie as both an actress, sound effect recorded, and cameraman. All of my suggestions and critiques were ignored. "Maybe we should cut that scene," "that doesn't make sense, what if ?" "I can't act that out" "no, I can't film that; it's too dangerous"
The project ended up worse off because no one's criticisms were listened to. I'm not saying that it would've been perfect if mine and some other people's criticisms were taken into account, but it wouldn't have been the forgettable garbage fire it was. Person leading the project was your typical spoiled white girl who refuses to listen to feedback because she is "perfect".
Now I'm scared to work in groups. I don't want my ideas tampered with, I don't want my ideas silenced. I don't want my dreams mangled beyond all belief.
The systematic murder of games is something I'm very concerned about. Especially since a lot of SINGLE PLAYER GAMES (!!!) nowadays have bound themselves to a server like a lich to a phylactery, dooming them once the publisher/developer no longer deems them profitable. I know this happens mostly for Anti-cheat, e.g. with Genshin Impact, a game that's very close to my heart. I just wish, Developers would add offline functionality just in case the servers are shut down. I'd pay them full price, just so I know, my player experience can't end overnight, if someone pulls the plug on the servers. But with how things are now, I'm actually a little scared to start games like Genshin and make more memories with them, knowing that I will never ever be able to revisit them in just a few years. On the other hand, if I don't play these games now, I will never make these experiences in the first place. It's a really uncomfortable situation.
10:58 Also, please don't sell yourself short Painticus! We all know, you've played more than four games! With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. it's at least five...
I fully agree. This is why so many fans sometimes desperately pirate and mod games, it's the only way to keep those games alive.
think a large part of the online conneciton for Genshin's also for the gatcha system. But that could still be handled fully client side for an offline variant. Just significantly increase your ablity to earn the premium currency in game and maybe bump up the odds. Set events to periodically re-run based on the system calender. And Make one last hit of profit off the paid offline version. Everyone wins, especially if they let you port progress and unlocks(especially exceptionally rare or well developed or collab units that they can't/won't rerun in the offline version)
@@deathstinger13 I'm pretty sure that's the main reason. I assume, if it was handled purely by the client side it would be significantly easier to cheat and get every character you want. However, this issue wouldn't be as significant if there was a full price offline version. However, the profit margins for Gacha are of course much higher than for full price titles...
@@LancerOfZero none of that's a issue when the main game's already hit end of life. who cares if you cheat in a single player game? You've already given them money, they're not going to be supporting or getting money from the gatcha version anyway. The whole point is this is something to do when a live service game ends service. when it stops seeing updates and is shut down. that's why this one used IDOLA and Dragalia Lost as examples of a game being lost. And X-Dive as an example of this one's idea. All three had their original Gatcha versions shut down, but X-Dive got an offline version.
So again, it's a single player game that's effectively several years old that people have already dumped potentially hundreds or even thousands of dollars into each. Who CARES if you cheat? They got one last 60 buck payment from you or something. And you get a lot of good PR, including suggesting that you could do that with your next Live Service game, making people feel a little more secure in spending money on it. Plus you've already done 90% of the work, all that needs to be done is to convert the game and especially its online features to no longer need an internet connection(or do a Peer-to-Peer/fan server compatible setup for multiplayer stuff, just like in the old days). By no means easy(especially if you use spaghetti code), but a hell of a lot easier than developing a whole new game from scratch.
@@deathstinger13 I actually didn't know, there was a precedent for this. For me all of this was just wishful thinking, since I didn't assume any game companies were willing to put in the effort at the end of a game's life cycle for an offline mode that won't be particularly profitable to them. And I still think something like this will probably be the exception, not the norm. But hey, if Capcom did it, maybe other companies will too. Thanks deathstinger13 and Capcom, you've given me a bit of hope back for the future of gaming. :D
Games can literally rot btw. As a programmer, you run into issues with the systems on which the games depend to operate. MMOs that are dying lose parts of their backend server cluster and entire maps become inaccessible. Rendering APIs break covering game worlds in nearly opaque fog that was never supposed to be there. Games become unable to run due to memory leaks on modern hardware unless you degrade their quality settings so far they are unrecognizable vs their original form. Rot in technology is far more prevalent and dangerous than you have any idea. Only because of the stagnation of the x86 instruction set did we even have the ability to run many of this older PC games for so long, but with the modern push to remove x86 from the x86/64 instruction set combination much like how the 16bit instruction mod was lost in the switch to x86/64 soon decades of games will become unplayable without severe degradation. Things have gotten so strange right now it is true that Linux can play more Windows games than any one version of Windows.
Good thing that it seems like 64 is the limit of where we are going to go. It really sucks to lose built in compatibility over the years. But then again, fans saying "I'm gong to do it myself" has been the driving force in media preservation since forever.
@@lpfan4491 Yes, but it's not just bit-depth. We might be on the x86/64 instruction set but the ARM64 set is different! Plus then there's the fun of CISC vs RISC, etc.
@@Nielk1 to be fair, the x64 to arm compatibilty story is much better than the x86/64 one, with both apple and microsoft having their own layer to basically recompile the x64 instructions to arm ones
@@5omebody whenever I see talk about CISC machine code running well on RISC processors I have to question HOW without a significant clock rate hit.
More than just that, code can rot very fucking fast if you rely on libraries, as pretty much everyone does. I use SFML and had to change quite a bit of my event handling code once in a project because of and update that changed how tracking mouse cursor location is done. Obviously, this is less likely to be an issue to consumers who get a compiled binary and don't have to deal with the compiler going "Whoops, don't know how to do that anymore", but it's a real issue. Especially if you don't use Windows, that does a lot to maintain some kind of backwards compatibility, I've noticed modern versions of certain dependencies not working for old software. Most recently, it was wanting to see how Dwarf Fortress was in 2006, but not being able to launch it because the version of SDL in the Arch repository right now has changed too much to run software reliant on it from 2006, at least on Linux. Preserving software is a very complex issue.
As a Librarian. Murder of Media/Art happens outside of games quite frequently and increasingly more often. It started with music and newspapers selling not the medium itself but only the access to them. Then movies did it aswell and now, at an alarmingly frequent rate, books/magazines and even pictures do this as well. The amount my city pays us for access to these media is now double that previously paid for physical copies. And we are only allowed to lend this copie for a specific amount of times, this is almost always lower than the amount of times a book is abel to be lend by a significant margin. And we don't even own the medium whe buy. If a e-reader producer just decides their devices don't support our files we offer, we just wasted all that money.
I hate this.
It's cut throat, greedy, undemocratic and abelist in my opinion and supports only the most well of people that need that access to media the least. Which is sad because it has the potential to be the opposite and have a genuine good impact for the weakest part of our community.
So, that was my little librarian rant. Good video:)
How is it abelist? I can see the other ones, but not abelism. Can you explain, please? :0
(This is a genuine question. I don't mean to be rude or ignorant)
@@Twiddle_things Probably the DRM locks out access to the text by assistive technologies because that access could be repurposed to bypass copy protection.
yeah i hate it so much when im buying some medical book for school and half of stuff there is only avaible for 1 year on the site. Like if I will become doctor and dont know one specific thing after 20 years how would i look this HOW???
there should be some kind of goverment payed hackers who specialize with stealing this stuff just for curious people
@Twiddle_things we have quite many disabled customers that rely on cheap and affordable media in our library. Some of them are mentally disabled, or even just old, and struggle using technology. They however want to be up to date by reading quality news or just consume media like you and I. If publishers lock their content behind expensive technology and expensive licenses, these people can no longer access these media independently.
some users may rely on affordable digital media because of impaired eyesight or similar disadvantages. At first digitalisation was a blessing for them. but now, that the price has skyrocketed and they sometimes need specific devices to access some works, they are endangered in getting locked out of the information source they so heavily rely on.
both examples can't just "move on" but suffer real, excessive losses. that’s why I said it was ableist. Also, English is not my first language, so maybe there is a better word I could have used but didn’t knew.
@@ssokolow I didn't think of that but yes, that would defintly count as an unfair disatvantage in my eyes.
Everything in Painticus culture leads it's roots back to PAGAN: Autogeny.
There's a 4th type, or perhaps a 3.5 type. While 3 is deliberate removal, there's also a simple lack of restoration. Because games are seen as toys rather than art or history, they aren't preserved and archived. Companies don't make effort to Support the roms. So the game eventually becomes inaccessible, lost due to indifference.
Yeah, so much is lost just because of unreadable disks...
If this was the case, we would have been much better off. It's what they said in the video about "dropping support" being used as a monicker for completely removing the titles while not letting other people tend to it. Have you seen the recent (not really) trend of people reverse engineering old games and releasing its code, so it can be freely modified and used on modern systems? Mario 64, Zelda 64, Diablo 1 to name a few. Theres ever looming danger of these projects being taken out by the developers, just like those custom WoW servers mentioned in the video. If games would be left by Companies to rot, they would be picked by community and archived, even tended to, to keep them alive. But all these operations are being actively thwarted by greedy corporations
There are toys that get preserved. And there is "art" that gets forgotten.
@@Tepiloxtlno, there are plenty of games which aren't archived or documented well enough to preserve. Although not a full game, there are versions of Minecraft that have gone through this. Many versions of Minecraft just, weren't preserved, until a group of people started doing it themselves. There was even a whole discovery of a version that existed for less than a day, and they only found it because someone on twitter had it saved to an old harddrive.
@@Nullbound I was responding to the root comment, and what you say still supports what I said. If the practice was to just drop support for such versions and let it rot instead of completely purging those versions, they would still be available on Mojang servers to download
I was involved in finding a bunch of mods for beta and alpha Minecraft from old hard drives and archives, I know how it looks like from that side
I'm an avid player of Honkai Star Rail. I'm also a disabled person who enjoys turn based games because I can't play fighting games because I can't see enough to be able to have a good time.
I'm always painfully aware the game is server based, and one day, it will shut down. It doesn't matter that it's single player: you have to be online to play it.
And I know it's probably gonna take a long time to end. It's a new game that has a lot of players, and Honkai Impact 3rd is still around, but it will happen.
Yes, things have to end, but it's frankly sad that you know that it's possible to stop it from happening sooner were it not for the fact that it seems they are made to _die_
The stories, the characters... All gone.
I remember the day Club Penguin shut down. And in a way I applaud the community for trying to keep it alive somehow with the copies. Of course, one of the sad parts is that it was community game for kids, and since it's not readily available to them new kids won't find it, but at least something is kept.
Specially single player games shouldn't just... Die like that.
I know. I really can't stand it. Why do single player turn based RPGs have to be always online? Why? It makes no sense. It's just greedy game publishers refusing to let go of control because of a false fear of piracy. Piracy is a non-issue, but these companies push DRM to keep an iron grip. The media you buy isn't even yours. You're paying to rent it from them.
11 year old me played a revival with my mum for a bit once
As also another Honkai player, really should not be legal for companies to release these kinds of games without updating them to run offline and unlocking everything once servers shut down imo
>Claims to have only played four games
>Shows off game that is not on the list
Why do you toy with us?
Truly, youtube is dead
'cause they ain't playin' around here
Plaza 96 actually reminds me of an experience I had with an MMO recently: ABSOLVER.
I had actually beaten the game already - about a year before I had this experience - but I wanted to play it again so I could pop some achievements.
I made a new save, and a new character, I sped through the tutorial, and got into the free-roam section of the game.
There were three people online. Not in one area. Not even in my REGION, to my understanding. Possibly just on ps4 (the console I had the game on), but something tells me I wouldn't have found many more people if I checked on my pc. As far as I was concerned, there were the only people playing at all.
One of them was at a save station, completely AFK. Characters turn to stone when you do this, so I couldn't attack or interact with them.
Another was in the coliseum, where the first real boss fight of the game happens. There were up on top of the thing, and I spent a few minutes trying to get up there. I think they got bored of waiting, and just left.
I didn't even see the other one. Ever.
I closed the game pretty shortly after, and haven't opened the game since. I sometimes think about trying it again, but somehow I get the feeling it'd only be me this time.
Funk. If I or anyone else could play...
what are you yappin about
it feels like absolver came out in the recent modern era (it definitely did??) and it wasn't that popular online on any platform beyond launch. Like... okay? It's not creepy or weird that there's a handful of ppl playing an aging and already-unpopular game
and it's also not an mmo (petty addition)
@@n0vi If you're going to be a pedant, at least learn how to spell and use grammar. Stop embarrassing yourself.
@@Imperial_Lizardgirl For me it's Story of Seasons. You need the multiplayer mode to get your wool, milk, etc to max quality, but it's impossible to do that now. Absolutely NO ONE is playing the game, and you're left in the queue for multiplayer mode indefinitely. You literally can't complete the game now because of it.
It's just another victim of the overhyped multiplayer boom of the 2000s.
@@WobblesandBean iirc Rune Factory 1 had this problem as well, it's impossible to marry one bachelorette because she requires an item quality impossible to obtain without trading to increase its level.
A game isn't really archived, until it's source code and assets are archived with documentation. A game binary isn't useful without the OS, it's stack, dependencies, and so on. If you have the source code, you can compile it or at least convert it to something that can be compiled. Until then, it remains ephemeral.
Recompiling isn't a magic panacea, though. Games are often deeply tied to the game engines they use, and those are deeply tied to the hardware and OS stacks that they're built for, and those are evolving not just in the details but in fundamental concepts of how they work. Porting the sources to something newer can mean that you have to completely understand how the sources worked on the old machine, and then re-design the low-level parts of it to work the same way on a new machine -- and that can be as much work as writing the game was in the first place. Including requiring you to redo a lot of the QA work, because game software is probably not going to come with unit tests to tell you if you translated it correctly.
It turns out that writing an emulator that can run an already-compiled game binary -- perhaps with some automatic translation of the machine code -- is often the easier project.
(Source: Worked in a large company porting our codebase to a different CPU type. And this wasn't game software or an operating-system change; it was just server-side code, and we were using the same Linux version on both. It was still a many-people many-year project.)
@@BrooksMoses internet user discovers why programming is a valued job
also "until it's source code and assets are archived with documentation" internet user discovers how to read the last two words of a sentence
You couldn't force me to document my code. I can barely understand it myself and you expect me to explain it?
on the abandonment part it's interesting to note that one of the major organizers of the haunted PS1 demo disc's own project "Sauna Simulator" has been in development hell
It's so fucking good watching someone who actually thinks for themselves instead of acusing that everyone else is the sheep
If you dont own the games you buy, piracy isnt stealing.
100%
Dumb take with no thought put into it.
@@EntitySteelcorpo defenders when they see an unlicked boot
@@EntitySteelisn't it funny that pirating gets ppl the premium experience and then you buy the same thing and you get the peasant experience😂
@@FilmBucket More like the truth. The implications given by the OP are completely moronic. If piracy isn't stealing, neither is AI art or writing.
One of those times where clicking on a video with a confusing title I know nothing about paid out big time.
What a channel, thanks for being here
That remake makes no sense set in 1993, DOOM was the shooters we had in 1993 not fully 3D rendered shooters. 1998 I could understand but under no circumstances would I ever believe that game was being played in 1993
Yeah, I don't know why these dudes are so stubborn about the time setting. It completely destroys all semblance of realism and immersion for me, which is a shame, because the remake looks authentic in every other way. I was there, that fake web forum and browser game was spot on for the era.
man, the outro section hits hard, especially the line going along the words of "always-online games will die because the developers deliberately kill them off"
pso2 is a game i hold so dear to me yet it got f%%king annihilated by pso2 ngs, a much more inferior version of a phantasy star game that fails to deliver on every front
it's technically on life support, just to probably prevent private servers from popping up
Jesus, my UA-cam app crashed when you showed the unrestrained Martyr
What an immersive experience
Really, the big reason the big corpos want to stop you from playing [old product] is because you're playing [old product] instead of [new product]. They want everyone to just move over to (and pay for) [new product] because it is the pricier option, even if it sucks.
They can't sell loot boxes to someone still playing the Black Ops 2 multiplayer and they're probably still kicking themselves very violently for making it P2P hosted.
This was an amazing video. I also wish that "agony of a dying MMO" actually touched on that topic. As a huge MMO player, I've seen a few MMO deaths in my time. Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 & 2, City of Heroes (I know it's back but it was gone for a LONG while and only came back because of the weirdest drama I've ever seen), Wildstar. There's this... immense amount of dread and despair you feel in an MMO's final days. Everyone is pretty low energy. Everyone both wants to do content, but also not. Scared of missing... something if they leave the lobbies/player towns. It feels kinda dumb to do a dungeon run or do a raid. You feel more productive, more meaning, out of sitting around the same corner of the city you always do and talking to friends.
The pressure of the deadline coming closer and closer. No one wants to think about, but it's all anyone can talk about. It's like death, real death, in that sense, but in a much smaller dose. Some people throw little parties to celebrate the time they had, others gather around and say their goodbyes. Some people call out in global chat "THANK YOU DEV TEAM" and others cry "DON'T DO THIS". The end is usually never much. I can only think of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 as an exception to the rule but a majority of the time when the clock hits 0, there's no fanfare. Just a disconnect error, and it's over. Gone. Snuffed out. All you feel like doing is sit in your chair and wonder "now what?"
MMO death feels a lot different than other games. With other live service games it just feels like any other day. I've basically learned to not attach myself to any of these things because I know they can end just as quick as they start. With MMO's it's a lot. There was a lot of time there, there was a world there, and it's just... gone.
I have something to throw in the ring: my experiences with Asheron’s Call. I grew up alongside the game with my parents being avid players. When I was old enough, I joined them. My mom left for WoW and my time with it grew spottier and spottier with my Dad until it went free to play with the last content update in 2014, but really that should have been our first big warning that the end was nigh. It wasn’t even three years later that Warner Brothers pulled the string on the puppet Turbine had become that threw the switch to shut the servers down.
You can look up the dismay, the sadness people felt as a nearly twenty year old game world was reduced to mere memories before their eyes.
The playerbase was promised an official toolkit for private servers that mysteriously never materialized and then radio silence became the order of the day. When we heard it was all shutting down suddenly interest rekindled in old server emulator projects and there was a mad dash to capture as much data as possible via packet captures to reconstruct as much as we could one day.
A while after shutdown there was an experimental emulator being worked on that showed lots of promise. Characters already in the world, working collision. Rudimentary combat and loot mechanics working. There was some rumbling about it making use of some leaked source and debug data from a few years after launch, just before the last expansion dropped, but I don’t recall if those claims were ever substantiated. Apparently it was enough for WB to twist the knife and send a cease and desist to the developer that was primarily working on it.
Thankfully he open sourced it and then went dark rather than let all of his work go to waste. Officially his source code just leaked. Unofficially we’re all pretty sure it was some kind of figurative dead man’s switch.
These days there’s a much more mature codebase people use instead, but it was the first emulator to hit playable status, and is the one all the “classic” forks of the game mainly use since the alleged leaked data was from about the timeframe these projects tend to want to emulate.
Hey, Painticus, I've been watching your content on and off for a little while now, but even if it doesn't come from "your biggest fan" or anything like that, I feel like someone has to say this.
Thank you, sincerely, I never had the chance to play The Crew (what living in a third world country does to a mf) despite my efforts otherwise, and the very possibility of that to never change is scary, to be locked out of experiencing not only The Crew as a game, but to set precedent for hundreds of other games to simply end, no matter how much the community behind it would support it.
It's heartwarming to see the message spread, especially from someone who seems as passionate as you about keeping games alive and breathing. I don't know how to properly end this, so, instead, you can have a second Thank you.
(killer vid btw loved it)
In addition to Silent Hills being a dead game, PT is interestingly two types of dead game at once. First it's a murdered game, but more interestingly it's a completed ARG. PT was a walking simulator horror game, a teaser for Silent Hills, and an ARG that tied those two aspects together. An ARG is a type of game that dies in a very unusual way since it becomes truly impossible to play, by their nature they're playable for a limited time, they're a puzzle that can only be solved once, and all they leave behind is the forum posts, the discussions, and the memories of them.
Wait, I remember Creepy Gaming covered Silent Hills back when it came off the PS store, but never heard of this ARG of it. Could you provide more info?
about the "kill your dreams" part: i'm so fucking tired of doing exactly that. either for one reason or another i've seen all of my fucking dreams die, or be realized in my stead, never done myself with my own two hands. i'm tired of doing that.
it's a hard thing to balance, in my experience it's not only having a realistic dream, but also having a realistic plan to get to said dream. I'm trying to become a commercial pilot and at first that task seems very daunting, after all you need a lot of time money and be able to understand the knowledge they give you. For many, this seems borderline impossible and for the few remaining they jump into it with the idea of "i'll figure it out as i go" which leads to many failing. From i've learned becoming a pilot, you have to not only have a plan, but also be out in the community as many people irl want to see you succeed ( as much as we're lead to believe otherwise) and are willing to give you a helping hand or pointers towards scholarships, training opportunities, or just act as an overall mentor.
I hope this helps and whatever you peruse, I hope you can take this to heart.
It's ok to mourn the direction you thought your life would go in. I was supposed to be an artist, a performer, a musician. But none of those things panned out. But life goes on, it HAS to. We don't have a choice. You have to find new meaning, because otherwise, you will waste your finite time on this earth being bitter over the stuff you didn't do.
This was heavy as hell. My, er, condolences, dude. Whatever they are worth.
We exist in a world where we are told to dream and shoot for the stars when all most can realistically expect us a day job and getting by moment by moment. A small population of people live life lavishly or have the kind of jobs and work that fulfills them, but sadly most of us can only afford to survive.
All the dreams I had died and I'm just trying to find motivation to work a job because I'd be content rotting away in a hole or some abandoned shack somewhere.
You and several other people here need therapy.
As someone who actually GOES to therapy, that isn't meant to be belittling, getting actual outside help is genuinely life-changing...even if there's no reliable way I know of to find professionals who actually know what they're doing, so it can take a few tries. Unfortunately.
A lot of us face more obstacles than we realize. So many of us that think we're lazy or useless are just playing life in handicap mode, because of problems like ADHD or depression. It doesn't have to be like that forever, though. This coming from someone who feels the same way, like a huge part of my life has been wasted failing to accomplish the things I really wanted to do...but not anymore.
There is one more type of game death you didnt cover, which i call "sickness". This is when a game slowly but surely is killed by an outside force with the only goal of destroying it. Be it through hacking or simply by spamming bots, this more recent type of game death can be seen in games like TF2 and Counterstrike. These games arent dead yet, but they are dying, very, very slowly.
there was a gamejam specifically about making a demo for a game to leave unfinished. exact rules is making a bare bones tech demo to demonstrate basic gameplay. one of my favorite games is from it
What is it called? I'd be curious to try out games from there
@@queenofrodents abstractioneering is the name of the game. the game jam was called "FINISH YOUR GAME!"
I remember there was an experience on Roblox called Super Paper Mario RP, it was built almost exactly like the popular deltarune one you can find today. When I was younger I used to hop on that experience to explore the beautifully crafted map, with areas built so true to the games it was like they plucking them straight out of the games themselves. Then Nintendo mass removed games themed of their franchisees off Roblox. Unsurprising that experience was one of them. Last year I went on to see if I could find it and explore it like I did years prior, but unsurprisingly, it was gone. There was a similar scare recently with Nintendo possibly removing the Nintendo themed content off the Gmod workshop. A lot of things we grew up on for years, even if each individual to ourselves, is sadly capable of being removed in less than a day all thanks to a couple peices of paperwork. Its really sad to see.
Bro I fuckin' played on that game near constantly as a kid. Met one of my best friends that I still have only the fondest memories of on there. I remember they even kept adding in things from other Mario games in the Paper Mario style, like the Observatory from Super Mario Galaxy lovingly recreated in the Paper Mario style. Was goddamn epic.
I felt a small part of me die when one day it just suddenly disappeared without rhyme or reason. Must've been around 2 years of my childhood just gone, for no reason seemingly. I only discovered what happened using this damn comment and while I would be outraged if it was still me back then, but now? I just feel empty because this is about what I expect from Nintendo now.
@lixix1337 yea it was devastating to see that it was gone, a lot of work was put into it it must have really hurt for the creator to lose all that work in a day or so.
The Gmod thing wasn't Nintendo's doing. It was some asshole copyright troll.
@imadrian98 yeah I know that, that's why I said it was a scare and not an actual thing, but because of how Nintendo is it was definitely very believable.
I was playing gmod right when that happened and seeing the "fuck you copyright" creations that popped up on the workshop, and people uploading more nintendo stuff out of sheer spite, was extremely funny to me.
The name PAGAN could be a reference to the many pagan faiths that had been crushed, absorbed, or forgotten over the course history.
Autogeny could also be connected to how various pagan gods and spiritual figures became re-contextualized as demons or spirits in folklore, bringing new life from the corpses of old gods
There's also those rare and wonderful cases like what we saw with City of Heroes, where eventually the biggest private server (and most accurate to what once was) finally got licensing rights from the previous publisher. They've been thriving, even. And to cap it off, they've added all sorts of things back into the game, using discarded assets and scrapped ideas for power sets and archetypes! It's rare that it works out like this. But when it does? The results can be brilliant.
@Painticus This doesn't even include games that ended when they were 'beaten', like Tower of Dragua: The Recovery of Babylim. It ended when the final boss, Dragua, was defeated. That was over a decade ago.
What does that mean exactly? I haven't heard of that game. /genq
@@catbatrat1760 When the players beat Dragua, aka the final boss, the mmo was shut down. that's it.
i've been thinking of how all of Little Big Planet's servers are officially dead as of this year. It's pretty heartbreaking, even if you can still play the offline versions of these games
Woah-
I think I might have found my exact favorite style of yt channel.
Absolutely going to be subscribing. Keep cooking.
THere is a thing about game death if it comes to multiplayer games- it's in a certain way natural.
It's not just about "grass is greener somewhere else" but about the always multiplayer game getting old and loosing it's playabilty, especially when people leave to play something else.
In no hidden way- singleplayer games can live with a small playerbase, multiplayer ones cannot, and accepting it is the healthy way- otherwise you get corpses forced to live in forme of "live service games" which force new unfitting clothes on a body they do not fit.
I’m in school for library science (specifically archival preservation) and there’s actually a HUGE convo in the community right now around how we can work to digitally preserve games. (especially those who were abandoned or technically lost due to no way to play them beyond “pirated” ports) It’s quite intriguing and lot of people are becoming very passionate about preserving such an important piece of gaming and internet history. Of course, theres a lot of questions relating to avoiding legal battles and saving the code that is decaying still so it’s a big process
Yo that is so cool! I didn't know that about Pagan! I now imagine a game that uses LOD models to show the deterioration of game assets. HMMMMMmmmmm. I gotta stop, I don't need a 6th game project right now.
It's such an interesting game! I recommend watching Painticus' two videos on it if you can't find the time to play - there's a lot of cool stuff in there
I thought that's what Basilisk did?
it does make me sad that yoy didn't talk about Agony Of A Dying MMO, since not many have actually done this whatsoever, like, no one has talked in length about it here, and I was sooo excited bc of the genuine passion you put in when you really want to delve into a topic.... but I get it >_<
This was an amazing video either way!! :3
28:56 "omg, woman and/or gay people exist... how dare they"
Will be a quote i will use, with this delivery... its just so... blunt and dumb
About the third part, while I mostly agree, I think is important to look beyond the "hurr durr women" people and see the real problem behind that specific stuff, that is that is not devs making this desicions, but company meetings and market studies. There's already almost no sincerity behind AAA games (beyond some exceptions) so these games trying to appeal to minorities in such a cookie cutter way is honestly very, very tiresome. As some lad in twitter once said "Look for representation from your peers, not companies", no committee will ever compare to individual experiences.
Also I know the video is old but Pirate Software has a video about the problems with SKG proposed implementation that, imo, is worth a watch.
Anyway, good video, tbh the concept of a simulation of a game being shut down through the lens of internet culture is really interesting, wish we could get more of that, specially with how relevant it has become post- covid.
Not sure what FPS map I would bound my soul to, but I can think of maps that I’d definitely do not want to be bound to:
2fort
Hydro
5-D Space
Snowbound
Derelict
Chiron TL 34
Nuketown
Why would you imprison yourself in the nightmare that is hydro
@@kaden-sd6vb If you thought you really deserved to go to Hell.
Nuketown and 2fort be chill though.
Whenever I hear some reactionary complain about how gaming is a dying industry, I have to think back on when I was very young and playing the official How to Train Your Dragon MMO. They "ended support" for that game years ago and I can never revisit it, and the only thing I have to remember any of it is my very small memories and the fan wiki. The game you love will not die because you have to choose some pronouns. The game you love will die when they see no value in it anymore.
I remember playing a little bit of that mmo, way back when
@@techwizsmith7963 It was honestly one of my favorite mmos, but I feel like not enough people remember it for there to even be an attempted revival project
Where were you when club penguin die?
apolgy for bad english it is my first languagen’t
where were you when club pengin die
i was at house eating dorito when phone ring
“club pengin is kil”
“no”
Also the Scratches OST caught me off guard at around 14:38 major nostalgia hit.
So, I'm curious. Since the actually murder of game's were discussed, and how gave devs will kill their game out of capitalistic greed, what about the other type of murder for videogames? Outside forces making a game unplayable, to force people to stop having fun, and therefore leave. I'm curious about if anyone has tried to capture this, since it's such a rare and brutal death. The only games that come to my mind for this type of death are many io games that are ruined by cheaters, and the current attempted murder of Team Fortress 2.
15:46 The fact you didnt even mention ManlyBadassHero, THE indie horror connoseur is WILD
As someone who has started and abandoned many projects, some I've worked 5+ years on, it's really refreshing to hear someone say that sometimes, you have to kill a project. You can't keep pushing something that just isn't working, and I think more artists need to hear this. GREAT video btw.
There was a game here. It's gone now.
How does this channel only have 13.9K subs and WHY have I never found it before ?
Absolutely amazing video.
I unfortunately have a constant deal-in with code falling apart due to updates and whatnot, but with a few patches here and there, it gets the job usually fixed.
I'm randomly spouting all of this because it's a scary thing to have happen and I'm glad somebody else covered this. Thank you.
wow i went to sub at the end of the video and figured you were a channel with at least 100k!! i love how you presented this. as someone who dabbles in creative hobbies, i particularly loved the section about how projects will inevitably be abandoned or destroyed, but rot is simply part of rebirth. rly resonated with me. awesome video, hope to see more from you
I feel like its important to punctuate the point made in "No Players Online" with another: you can't let that truth in creativity stop you. Sure, maybe what you want to make it won't, can't or shouldn't be made, but you can't let that paralyze you. You won't know what your idea will fall into until you try. Just pick up what you learned from what couldn't be finished and carry it to the next. Until you find the idea that does bloom😊
THANK YOU for calling out the absolutely absurd VHS nonsense on No Players Online, it's awful, it's completely anachronistic, it doesnt work, and the dev is old enough to know better or just look it up. when the updated version was posted to Alpha Beta Gamer recently the comment section ripped it apart for this. and ABG tried to posit that the devs are in fact trying to do something interesting with it but like you, i absolutely DO NOT buy it, it doesn't work. the new demo DOES still have the VHS artifacting and anachronisms though, unless ABG was playing a different version than you were
I love the fact that you talk about Pagan: Autogeny so much but have something different to say about it each time. You could do a Pagan analysis channel at this rate.
Also it's weirdly ironic that you never ended up fully talking about Agony Of A Dying MMO. I agree it doesn't really match the section you originally picked it for, although it is still a fascinating story experience that really had me intrigued all the way through and it would have been interesting to get your thoughts on that. But what's ironic is that this is also a demo for a full game that we haven't see any update for in ages. I genuinely don't know if the project is still going or not, I'm hoping it is but as you pointed out yourself it's unfortunately very common for demos like this to never become full games.
rotting code to me brings a game called Il-2 1946 to mind. an old flight simulator still available for purchase. if its code was subject to rot, then it is strewn with black mold and its foundations are cracked and ruined. it is a beautiful, well crafted castle long forgotten by its lord, yet still lived in by its tenants, desperately keeping it from collapsing.
The modders have put so much effort in to it that is something far beyond what could ever be achieved otherwise. That said the foundation is still cracked nonetheless, after all the first edition is now 22 years old. One could wonder what they could do instead of they made a remake of it instead, not that that is going to happen. Then is the fact that nothing really has replaced the niche in combat sims that it filled. IL-2 GB just can't handle the same mission sizes so it limits possibilities in that regard.
That third one. That's not new. It's a blatant form of engineered obsolescence. When you want players to play your new game, you kill the previous one, so they have to keep paying for a replacement.
I heard talk of a second gaming crash. Shit like this, this is what'll cause it. First it will be games, and then the means to make them. Unity tried, and it nearly killed them.
I've even read rumors of Microsoft eyeing Valve. Imagine, the entire steam library, filled with games you can't get anywhere else anymore. Ransomed. Gone. Made way for new Vanishware that they can charge $100 for, because too many fucking people will buy it because it has Ninja's or some shit.
I'd like to say I can't believe in a crash with indie doing as well as it is, but even indie is attracting money men in those oxymoron "indie publishers" like Devolver or tinyBuild. The exact kind of people killing AAA. Let's just hope they all go bankrupt soon and artists can get in control of making art again.
This video was extremely touching and a wonderful analysis of what i love so much about video games. people's ability to come together and create something, even for a moment, has always fascinated me. I really hope to see your channel blow up because this content is incredibly entertaining and wonderfully retrospective
it's especially frustrating since one of the most profitable genre of games right now is especially vulnerable to that last cause of death; Gatcha games. While yes, some may decry them as P2W low effort trash, and many are, several are still very solid games with dedicated fanbases. Games like Genshin Impact, Honkai impact 3rd and Star Rail, Epic 7, and more all have large player bases that dump in huge amounts of money. but one day, it'll all just...vanish. Too many go the route of Dragalia Lost or IDOLA A Phantasy Star Saga; vanishing at EOL. Along with all the progress and effort and purchases made. Too few take the path Megaman X-Dive took, developing an offline version so that the game itself could live on in some small form. The ideal would be a standalone that lets you port over your progress and unlocks, maybe supporting PTP connectivity to maintain at least some of the online content, but otherwise everything handled client-side. Have the game automatically re-run events periodically. Maybe you couldn't redo most collab events, but fully in-house events, or cross-game events all owned by the same company should be fine.
Thing about gacha games is, by all accounts, the simple inclusion of that design element is intentionally hanging the reaper over it. If anything, I feel like people are more justified with the annoyance at their existence despite any sort of good gameplay it might have elsewhere. Gacha mechanics do not give a game any sort of beneficial player impact and just put an excessive amount of pressure on its existence as if the game doesn't turn out to be the second coming of Christ then an expiration date is all but guaranteed for it.
This video has been stuck in my recommended for 2 weeks in my sidebar when I watch other videos, and I thought it was just you playing that cursed CTF game everyone was playing a few weeks ago. Nope, it's a much better video than that. Subbed.
Something a friend of mine told me about is a type of game he absolutely refuses to interact with, and it specifically involves the exact types of games that are even capable of dying in the first place. He doesn't even like to call them "games", he calls them "events" because they're almost reveling in their temporary nature with online-only and constantly changing via updates. In a way, games lose a part of themselves with every patch, even if people believe it's for the better that's still an experience that can never be played again.
Your anger and passion really makes an already great video even better
this is way too underrated for the actual quality, message and how well this works. i may be a bit biased but i love videos and video essays about this type of stuff. where games arent just programs made for entertainment but so much more. its more than signals of electricity, its the time the people who shed tears, sweat and blood spent to make it, so you can enjoy it. its more than just "a game" its (as cringy as it may sound) an experience. and being forgotten or just ending is so tragic to the game, its fans and the developers who made it. even if its parts may be reused and the devs move on to make a sequel or something new, something many people loved and played everyday has just become a memory
In regards to the talk about exploring empty MMOs I’ve actually seen another UA-camr, Josh Strife Hayes, do this. He usually reviews older, obscure, or poorly reviewed MMOs on his channel. One of the MMOs he checked out was called Otherland. It was empty, with himself as genuinely the only person on the server (before some of his viewers joined in), but he thought the visuals were unique and beautiful and when he checked the achievements he came up with the goal of trying to become the top player by collecting the rarest achievement before the shutdown. It’s a 10 part series with each part lasting roughly 40 to 50 minutes.
Great analysis, loved it. Came across your channel recently and immediately watched pretty much every video. Nice to come across a channel that hasn't drank any of the various flavours of outrage kool-aid doing the rounds today.
Great video! I'm a huge fan of Hauntology in general, so this was very much up my alley.
City of Heroes is a rare case of a killed game returning to life... but it wouldn't have happened if someone hadn't broken 'the rules'. One of the developers had secretly leaked the back end info that was necessary to make it actually run. The server side data, that is. And a private server had quietly run in secrecy for years.
Once the whistle was finally blown on it, the company that owned the IP could have killed it again... but they didn't. I think it was due to all the bad press they got for killing it the first time. Either way, the server was left to quietly run... and tentatively people running it reached out to the company to get some kind of arrangement working.
Surprisingly, and thankfully, it kind of worked. Now they're allowed to take donations for server costs, and they've started continuing active development. All of this could have just been avoided, though... if the company had allowed the game to go on maintenance mode to begin with, or if they'd sold it to one of the numerous buyers.
The ending made me want to print the code of my projects out so I could hug the broken mess of shoddy design... A better death indeed, for at least I learned and saw some wild bugs.
Came for the video premise, stuck around because you have a phenominal voice for this kind of content, and subbed for your based takes at the end. Great video!
"We buy their products, the least they can do as a favor is to let us own it."
Dread.
You said you've made at least one person cry early in this video and reaching the latter half of it I want to say you can now make that two. Great video of course,
I will forever be bitter about the fall of City of Heroes and ArcheAge. The players raised up money to straight up BUY CoH from the publishers, but nope, they shelved it instead. And ArcheAge.....most hyped game, extremely popular, killed by greed. Fuckin' travesty. There's ones like Secret World too, not 'dead', but zombified for sure.
CoH has private servers since ages now,can still be enjoyed
Alriiiight, this is right up my alley! And you're starting with Pagan? This is gonna be a treat
The algorithm brought me here and I couldn't be happier. You've gained a sub!
The little political tangent kinda felt like it came out of nowhere, only things I myself am mad at is all the unnecessary censorship that soilless corporations want to force on video games into order to net more profit. Video games are art and censorship of art, ANY ART FOR ANY REASON is something that should be fought against.
This is the first video of yours I've seen and my guy, that ending rant has earned my subscription, my comment and my like. Fuck the concept of "not owning anything". I don't play online games? I play single player only, but for those games I love - I download the installers, I back them up on external hard drives, hell if theyre exclusively on Steam I pirate them if it'll get me an installation file. Fuck that corpo BS, when I buy media? I'm fucking *keeping* that media.
A little surprised to not see Inscryption or other Daniel Mullins games mentioned, but good video as always anyway.
The third and final type, there may still be SOME hope. Postal 2 was dead because of a random Russian authentication server being shut down, but fans managed to spoof it for play. Battleborn died an ignominious death in the shadow of Overwatch, but one fan is meticulously reverse-engineering the codebase itself to make it playable and sharing this new installer IN THE OFFICIAL DISCORD SERVER. Playstation Home, a free app most people never even installed, is slowly coming back to life thanks to the work of diligent archivists at Destination Home and people volunteering all of the data on their PS3 hard drives. There is some hope for some dead games.
_video games_ have never had it better
_gaming_ peaked in the 00s
The hobby is harmed by dilution of experience with too many expensive, low quality titles and predatory business practices. Gamers tolerate this because logically things are going well and because we remember when it felt that way too. That's why the zeitgeist claims that gaming has gone bad, because there is a cognitive dissonance between the hobby's current potential for enjoyment and the realized disappointment.
Personally, I think it's ropegut; that feeling of pleasurable anxiety at the top of a hill or rollercoaster where you feel like you'll fly away were it not for your guts tying you down. The video games hobby has so much inertia as it rises and it's time to split it into various other hobbies. Retro, emulators, RPGs, MMOs, etc. it's time to start choosing what _kind_ of gamer you are; the hobby as a whole is too broad now to please everyone as what was once a cannonball now rains down as grapeshot. We had to do it with books and with film too.
I think a great game that represents the third part of this video is Shipwrecked 64.
Spoilers, but it does involve a decently known studio having their game killed by a corporation. Its a fantastic game even beyond that theme of "Murder", especially with other kinds of murder.
Physical decay of a game is fairly terrifying if it happens unexpectedly especially since it’s signalling something is going something wrong you can’t repair. My save of saints row 3 bugged out and broke vehicles and pedestrians in a bizarre way but only sometimes, to keep it unexpected. Then you think, can I fix this, will it eventually ruin everything? That serves to ultimately undermine the main experience and add a weird layer of dread or sadness over the game, especially when it’s supposed to be a light hearted experience.
Personally, I found the footage for the final example amazing. The comments and chat just feel so real...
I think he was trying to say that those specific parts worked well but the "dying game" narrative wasn't as applicable as, say, a dying forum or something
came for the topic, stayed for the gamergate shade lmao keep up the great work
This video was fucking poetry, man. I will not restrain myself in saying that you absolutely cooked up with this script. Additionally, that thing about "abandoning a project is not bad, it's necessary" is the EXACT thing that I needed to hear as a music producer in this early, troublesome stage of my career. Really good video overall, thanks for this one.
There's currently no better example of a rotting and decaying game like Team Fortress 2. The game has been around for over 15 years now, and the devs of the game seem to disregard it's current state of affairs.
Because of this, the game is infested with bots of various kind and more importantly swarmed by cheaters and hackers who do nothing but engage in acts of dishonesty and childish behavior that further buries the game. From all of this, new experiences are obtained from a game that is indeed currently rotting - But I think that access to interaction is dwindling. I wish at this point Valve would either kill TF2 outright, so it can finally die, or adapt it to more modern sensibilities and actually see continued support and effort. It is agonizing to see it in this state of perpetual limbo - unable to die, just existing in this constant decaying state.
Anyway, loved the vid, thanks for the watch
They recently cracked down on the bots, so that’s something.
Man, call me crass but i'd shit myself in real time if a game told me to destroy my computer
Gaming is dead. Long live (indie) gaming!
Hey, Painticus, would you ever make a video about Who’s Lila? I think it would fit very well with the channel.
I'd argue the hyper competitive video game industry of today IS a bad thing - it's forcing a kind of stagnancy as devs increasingly refuse to try new things.
Also please stop showing me WoW footage, you'll make me relapse.
Pirates Online went offline in 2013, and it was brought back by fans under the name "Legend of Pirates Online." Thankfully, Disney hasn't made any effort to shut it down, and it still has a couple hundred people playing on a given day. I've thought about giving it a shot, because I loved Pirates Online as a kid, and I was sad to see it go.
"I don't know what kind of shape they are, but it seems like the kind of thing a D&D enthusiast just kind of owns"
HI, D&D ENTHUSIAST HERE, that looks like it could be a d8! Not sure how well it would roll tho
I like to think that the flying weird geometric shapes in Pagan: Autogeny are actually characters whose textures colapsed into their hitboxes after they realised their hitboxes were the real them.
Wow, I remember watching that original video on Pagan: Autogeny. Is it really five years old? Your video (and narration) quality has dramatically improved and become much more stylized since then.
Great video as always, Paint. Been thinking about this a lot lately with the increasing "games as a service" model and so on.
Games made to mimic dead games. We are reaching levels of hyperreality never thought possible!
I think No Players Online is even sadder because the exact type of game death the game is about happened to the developers with their next project Spookware, it's a game that will forever sit at half complete, despite how much obvious love went into the project.
I can't help but find it amusing that "Estrogen" is a stat in Plaza 96, like one of the original goals of the game was to become a woman.
Ironically Beeswax games, the devs behind no players online, just had their game Spookware cancelled. Most likely because of their publisher DreadXP
Wait huh???
For the last few years aaa has been dying and rotting. Luckily Indie and aa are growing in that rot like crazy
like fungi
Imagine exploring a virtual cyberscape in cyberspace and finding essentially a digital ecosystem that... actually, it looks like the ecosystems of realspace. Various rotting games have been turned into nutrition for "fungal games" and such. Codes forming tall trees, softwares forming fauna, etc.
If exploration of ACTUAL cyberspace becomes possible in the future, THAT would be an interesting way of depicting it all...
Except triple A has been getting better, see resident evil and yakuza alongside cyberpunk and star wars survivors
@@LordTrashcanRulez cyberpunk 2077 heavily dropped the ball, at least at launch. It took a while for the game to be ‘complete.’
Resident Evil, at least from what I’ve seen of the last two games, not including remakes/remasters, they seemed to have knocked it outta the park.. not heard much about the new Star Wars games, as holy shit, the shitshow that’s been Star Wars for years at this point.. yakuza seems somehow fine.
I feel like the game "Hyponospace Outlaw" fits PERFECTLY into this categorization of games. Strangely, I've never seen anyone talking about it despite how much I enjoyed my play through of it. If you have the time, I'd absolutely recommend playing it. It's only a few hours long, and unlike these other games, you, the player witness the program while its active, through its downfall, and then the restoration efforts years afterwards. I won't spoil the game, it's significantly better to just experience blind.
Was excited for this video!
Things progress over time, but I actually like how sounded in that 5 year old video. The you from 5 years ago sounds like a dude in his first week on the job and the you now sounds like someone who's ran the gauntlet and got the scars to prove it. That's what growth is.