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Comment by brink | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I doubt it will still have LAN.

A sorely missed feature that makes a game really feel like it's yours after purchase rather than just on lease until the servers shut down.

I'd be happily corrected about this though.

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This is Blizzard. They're still running the "Battle.net" servers for games they released over 20 years ago.

What about when Blizzard doesn't exists anymore ?

This summer with a group of friends we wanted to play Battlefied 2 (2005), official support for that game ended years ago, and even with the unofficial patches, we couldn't play in a fully offline LAN, the game needs to ping a specific server to enable, even local, multiplayer.

An interested group will reverse engineer and reimplement the server-side components.

Where's the reverse-engineered server for bf2?

AFAIK, vanilla BF2 has more or less been abandoned by the BF2 community for this.

I'm not sure how they reworked the entire thing, so I'm guessing you might find the source-code/reverse-engineered stuff somewhere.

"Project Reality: Battlefield 2 is a free-to-download single and multiplayer game modification for the Battlefield 2 (BF2) retail Microsoft Windows PC game. Project Reality installs alongside your existing Battlefield 2 game installation, allowing both the original game and Project Reality to be played separately without conflict."

https://www.realitymod.com/about

Even if, like for BF2, you can patch (cough hack intellectual property) the game to change what server it has to ping to enable "online" play, it will still needs a, as you say, third party benevolent group and we still won't be able to do what I was trying to do, which is a basic, fully offline LAN gameplay.

My friends and I often play BF2 remotely on a vLAN through a VPN, so we are quite used to BF2 networks tricks, and I thought we could trick the game, no luck.

If you can get your hands on the very first, unpatched version, it should work. I got that to run in an offline LAN setting.

EDIT: I remember now what the problem was, running a co-op local game. They'd allow you to do a LAN game, but not with bots. A friend of mine played it locally in single-player, and I'd use my online account to connect with IP, a button which was only unlocked if you used an online account. You may be able to work around it by specifying the IP address to connect to in the windows shortcut for launching the game.

EDIT2: I may or may have not been using a crack at the time, not sure if that has anything to do with requiring an online connection...

Blizzard already doesn't exist, it's all Activision and the future of their games is to take all the dark patterns they can think of and run all the players through a funnel of obfuscated currency and gambling and call the ones who emerge spending thousands "whales".

A depressingly accurate description for most AAA publishers these days.

Not that this is really new, but thanks to MTX it's been pretty much-raining money for them, massively rewarding them for these anti-consumer methods.

By now stuff that used to be reserved to F2P skinnerware, has slowly been creeping its way into full-priced games as "extra" monetization.

Add Google Stadia, with every big name in gaming following the trail, and people won't even be owning the hardware the game is running on anymore. It's all quite dystopian..

Heh, from the looks of things, there are a number of people interested in playing BF2 in this day and age, even if only for nostalgic reasons. It's quite a pity that EA doesn't offer us that satisfaction, I'm quite sure a number of us would all go "Shut up and take my money!" about it.

If you go to the official BF2 website (I was surprised it still exists and is hosted) and click on "Buy", they redirect you to the 2016 "Battlefield 1" game.

...no EA, that's not how it works, then don't have any money from me at all.

Question - is it really that hard to achieve this? Seems like something you could throw in a VM and call it a day. Especially with the way things are scaling vs 20 year old games. Presumably you can run the entire world's worth of 20 year games off a crappy VM

It's additional attack surface which they have to maintain. Consider that those servers probably need access to customer's personal information for licensing and authentication reasons.

SC Remastered has a LAN mode, we used it earlier this week. So there’s some hope, at least.

It's kinda strange that the LAN feature keeps not being added to new games, since setting up a LAN nowadays is super easy compared to the late 90s.

Well, the old games are still around and still fun. Also, there's open-source games, which generally do multiplayer via LAN only.

At my last LAN party, we were six people in a room without internet connection [1]. I brought a bunch of open-source games and ZIP archives of classic games with No-CD patches and put them on a plain HTTP server for distribution. We mostly played WC3 (with the original Dota map) and Widelands (a Settlers 2 clone), but everyone's favorite was Empty Epsilon (the OSS clone of Star Trek Bridge Simulator).

[1] #Neuland :)

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