Oh man, I love a good first person RPG, they simply don't make them like this anymore. While I prefer a single character RPG, the aura and fun available in party based ones is not lost on me. This genre is probably my favorite when it comes to role-playing games.
I remember playing Alternate Reality: The Dungeon, first on Commodore 64 then later emulated on an Apple IIe for years. I only stopped playing it regularly around the time Covid hit and I was an essential worker so I was working overtime every week trying to keep up with the workload.
Such a fun genre though. I wish more games would be released in this style.
As they say they don’t make them like the use to. So many modern day games have an expiration date as well.
While I was not a big fan of Might and Magic X Legacy. At one point it was unplayable if you did not already have the game downloaded and were past a certain part. As they turned off live services servers despite it being a single player game and it broke it. Now that is just crazy. Later on they would patch the game to work again.
One genre I see being broken completely eventually is the battle royale stuff. It is wild to think that some day games like Fortnite will simply stop working.
That darn live services crap for single player games really turned me off back in the days of "Gaming on Windows" and such. I was just getting back into computer gaming, checking out reviews and such, trying to see what I would like to try out and I constantly heard about "live connection" this and that, or "phone home to check in regularly" and I just went right back to the classics.
I have been spending a lot of time over on GoG.com looking over their classic RPGs. Thinking about grabbing one called Anvil of Dawn, it looks interesting.
It will be interesting to see how battle royale manage their decline. I recall when early MMOs hit the issue of not having enough players for raiding when a game declined to fast. It was a total nightmare and one that still haunts a few games out there today.
There is this one faction based PvP game I’m forgetting the name of. I recall logging in and just being able to raid the other sides positions and flip regions with almost no resistance. Making the entire map almost all of your faction. Then a certain time would hit every day and everyone from the other faction would log in and most of the faction I was on would log out. They then would spend the night flipping everything back to their side.
Battle Royale style games are in a pickle of sorts. Some like Black Ops 6 charge A LOT for the base game while others like Fortnite and PUBG Mobile are free to play.
It is a fine line to making money with either. Too many "buy this" stuff and people will feel taken advantage of no matter the cost of the base game.
Eventually all online games die, just a matter of how long they live.