ampersandrew

Hey, folks! A lot of us here are pretty down on live service games for all sorts of reasons, but there are a number of great games that will always be playable thanks to DRM-free copies and low-latency VPNs that simulate a LAN. It's been so, so long since a shooter was made for me, and a number of my friends are quite dissatisfied with the market as well, that I decided to put in a little effort and make it happen.

Disclaimers:

• I am not an expert on this stuff. Some stuff I researched for this project, and some I just remember how to do from the old days.
• There is an easier way to do this, using free services like Hamachi or similar. I have found that, in rare cases, Hamachi just didn't work for some LAN games for reasons I couldn't discern; and services like these also tend to impose limits on how many users you can have for free. I went with SoftEther because it is still developed in the modern era, works on Linux and Windows, and I can be in control, so that the terms of service will never change. If you don't want to go through setup for SoftEther, a free service like that one will likely work, too.

Setting up SoftEther VPN

I mostly followed the instructions in this guide to set up SoftEther. I'm hosting the server locally on my Ubuntu desktop machine though, so I made the following changes:

• I downloaded the install files with a regular GUI rather than the terminal web browser
• I did NOT set the server to start up with my computer, so that I can control when friends can connect to my VPN
• Port forwarding is done via my regular router UI, which I'll cover later

You'll need a VPN client as well as the VPN server. On Windows, your client is a regular GUI, and you can follow the instructions in the video; basically, you're just right-clicking and creating a new connection with the account that you set up with the server. On Linux, for some reason, we only get a command line client, and you can find instructions here. Note that, on Linux, you do need to separately request an IP address from your VPN, as it isn't done for you as part of connecting to the VPN.

Port Forwarding

The newest game I'll mention in this post came out in 2008. That was 17 years ago. Someone reading this post may not have been born in an era where they ever had to port forward to play an online game. These days it's abstracted behind services like Steam or a game's official servers, but if you're hosting the server yourself, you need to port forward.

The gist is that your router's IP address is the only thing visible to the outside world, so if you want people who are looking for your VPN server to find it on your computer, you need to tell your router, "Whenever someone comes to your IP address on this port, send it to my machine." When friends are trying to connect to your VPN, you give them the IP address that you find on whatismyip.com, and it gets forwarded to your computer on your local network. When people connect to your VPN, they can then just find your hosted game via LAN. You can actually sidestep the entire VPN part of this process if your game can directly connect to a given IP address, which some but not all games allow for. I personally find the VPN easier than trying to find this information for each game.

The ports that you need to forward are found in the server setup video that I linked above. I also forwarded port 22 for the SFTP section below.

The SFTP Server

Using Filezilla on Windows or a generic SFTP setup on Linux, I can host any files that my friends need. I can host the client installer for the VPN, so there's no chance we're ever on different versions of the software. I can host mods for Star Wars: Episode I - Racer that fix the network play and add better support for modern controllers. I can host full on installers for delisted games like Unreal Tournament and Battlefield 2; I found one of these to be difficult to even pirate, but fortunately there was an archive somewhere on the internet that I was able to find.

The Games

GOG has been great for this. They do lots of work to old games, and you can just about always be sure that you've got the latest version compared to installing games off of your old discs. Here's what I've tested so far, all from GOG:

• Crysis Wars
• F.E.A.R. Combat (didn't work; the GOG version returned a CD error, which I reported to support; allegedly, a mod can fix this)
• Red Faction
• Star Wars: Battlefront II, the good one (you can't mix and match the Galaxy/Heroic version with the offline installer version, I found out; the Galaxy/Heroic version is one of the few in this list that still has functioning online in the wake of GameSpy's death)
• Star Wars: Episode I - Racer
• XIII (classic)

I still have yet to test (but expect them to work):

• Battlefield 1942 (not from GOG)
• Battlefield 2 (not from GOG)
• Flatout
• Flatout 2
• Unreal Tournament (now delisted)
• Unreal Tournament 2004 (now delisted)

Some observations, thoughts, and room for improvement...

As I said above, I'm not an expert. There are some things I'd like to improve if I knew the way to get there.

1. Transferring files over that SFTP seems to be limited to about 1.8MB/s per file. If you're downloading multiple files, that's all well and good, but I'm not sure why there's this speed limit there, nor if it's the fault of my server or my friends' clients.

2. Similarly, when my friends connect to my VPN, they're getting about 2/3 access to my entire bandwidth of 300mbps. All traffic from their machine, once connected, is sent through mine before it hits the wider internet, including our Discord call. Fortunately, neither Discord nor online games require a ton of traffic, but it would be nice to have only the LAN traffic go through LAN. I've found a number of sources suggesting ways to maybe achieve that, some on the client side, some on the server side, but my friends only have so much availability and tolerance to go through these sorts of tests with me. It's fine for now, when we play in small groups, but if I ever find myself in a situation where we want to get a 16 player game of Battlefield 2 going, which is unlikely but possible with my friend group, this setup might not scale well with my bandwidth limits.

3. For some reason, while we can run LAN games over this VPN setup, I can't ping my friends' VPN IP address directly. This doesn't harm anything, but pinging is a pretty routine troubleshooting step that for some reason just doesn't work for me.

4. When I go into the server manager and check the DhcpTable, I can see every one of my friends' computers' names except my own. I suspect because my Linux client isn't reporting my PC name. I don't know why this is. I'm the only one in the group on Linux, so I know I'm the one with a blank host name, but I found it odd.

Conclusion

There is something that just hits right about some of these old games, when you're just playing them for fun rather than some extrinsic reward like a battle pass skin. Allowing me to be an old man for a second, maybe we added too much to some of these games and genres, and it would be nice to see some more games come out that retain what these games had going for them, knowing that they won't retain an audience for more than a few months. That used to be okay.

FYI: full of spoilers for both Wolfenstein games that Machine Games made. Includes comments about continuing the series.

To paraphrase Jeff Grubb, there's been more smoke lately indicating a console than VR, but "frame" implies glasses implies VR headset. It could go either way or both, where the console and VR are complementary. Or neither! But I think smart money is on Valve announcing new hardware imminently, and personally, I think it's a console like a Steam Machine but with the library problem now solved.

There were leaked specs for hardware that Valve was testing that could theoretically retail between $500 and $700, but that is analysis and inference only, not an announcement. Separately, there were leaked designs of a new Steam controller that was supposedly on its way to the production line for mass production. Valve also has ties to Keighley and the Game Awards, where Alyx was announced back in 2019 before a March release in 2020, so there could be something like that again. Another reminder that the next Half-Life game is also rumored to be imminent, so it would make sense to pair these things together like Alyx and the Index.

This could just be the vestiges of E3's ghost creating a bad demo, but I was pretty unimpressed by this. If Hitman allowed you to be as freeform as Crysis, this demo looked like Crysis 2, highlighting all the specific options that they crafted for you to use, and there are only maybe three of them rather than allowing you to get creative and come up with your own answers to things. But that's only based on what they showed. Then, regardless of the quality of the game, I still don't trust IO Interactive after the online shenanigans they pulled in those last Hitman games. But hey, I figured I'd share this reveal here, as it is in fact video game news.

Take-Two almost took over the project and seemingly wanted to take over the franchise, but Microsoft didn't agree to the terms, hence the Crystal Dynamics layoffs. I still doubt that this game would have turned into anything other than the most generic form of whatever FPSes are these days, which I'm not enthused about, but it's moot anyway, because the project is dead and these people are out of a job.

Featured in this video: Blizzard doing exactly the shitty thing that we suspected they were doing, and a Ubisoft developer using an example where they can point to a law on the books to stop their bosses from doing shitty things.

It would be nice to see some more IPs liberated from Ubisoft, since they're not using them anyway.

"And at least part of that plan involves AI", reads the subtitle. To be clear, not an endorsement from me. Some of this reads very strangely to me, but this is boots on the ground reporting from Gamescom of developer sentiment.

...having spent the past four days dashing between appointments with CEOs and developers, there is one sentiment that has remained consistent among almost everyone I spoke to. We need to make games quicker.

Amen. Twenty years ago, 3 years was a long dev cycle, and most games were churned out in 12-18 months. It also relied heavily on crunch, but maybe we could get back to 3 year dev cycles that don't, and that can be considered somewhat "normal".

Of course, it's one thing to say you want to make games more quickly, and quite another to actually do it. More to the point, how do you do it?

Well, I, for one, would start with the bloat that made its way into mainstay series. The icon barf of Assassin's Creed. Turning series open world that have no business doing so. Making a huge game as the first outing in a series instead of seeing if there's even an appetite for the premise in the first place.

One option is to make games that look worse. Given how super-detailed graphics seem to be far less important to a younger generation raised on Roblox and Minecraft, this would seem like a fair enough strategy. ... Yet there seemed to be little appetite for this strategy among the people I spoke to at Gamescom. Perhaps it's an unwillingness to fly in the face of conventional wisdom in an industry where frame rates are often fetishised. Perhaps it's more about simple pride in the craft.

So are we refusing to do what's actually necessary to keep people's jobs sustainable, or...?

So what's the alternative? One option is to use AI to speed up the development process. And it's an option that more and more studios are taking up. ... AI is the games industry's dirty little open secret – the majority of people I spoke to said they were using AI in some form or another.

And this is where I know a lot of people would like to stop reading, but I'd encourage you to continue anyway.

Utilising AI to generate snippets of code was a popular choice.

To date, this is the only use I've ever heard, as a programmer, as something that might be useful for my job. Not that I've done it. I can still come up with snippets quickly enough just from old fashioned documentation most of the time. But sometimes it's written so generic that it takes hours of your day or more to actually learn it. And that's not the most common thing in the world that I run into that.

I do wish the author broke down how much, and which pieces, of this came from developers compared to executives/managers/owners. I'm glad to hear that everyone agrees that shorter dev cycles are a goal worth pursuing. I'm not convinced AI gets us there, and I wonder how many programmers really feel it's speeding them along in their day-to-day such that it can reduce a development schedule by literal years.

For four years, we had to deal with the "tower". Even if it functioned properly all the time, which it frequently didn't, it was a miserable experience. They've now got a standard matchmaking and ranking system, which makes it so much easier to keep playing this game that has largely always been excellent once you actually got into a match. The one gripe I have with it is that the ranked matches are first-to-2-wins, or best 2 out of 3, and this game is always played first-to-3-wins, or best 3 out of 5, in any other circumstance. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I haven't played quite so much for the past year, because having to deal with the tower was quite a deterrent, but I'd still say I have a pretty good understanding of the game, its systems, and how to turn you into a better player. At one point, on the unofficial ranking sites that are now suddenly obsolete, I climbed as high as 1700 Elo as Goldlewis.

They explicitly mention Stop Killing Games discussions from their customers as a large contributing factor to the work they did on this, which is awesome. Less awesome is the things that this announcement leaves to the imagination. It sounds like it will just shift to using the platform's multiplayer services for finding peer-to-peer games rather than letting you point your client at any server IP address you wish. This is absolutely better than nothing, but if I assume that they're doing the minimum required to achieve what this post says they're doing, then there's still more to be done.

I'll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of "community" from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly that I'd join a game in a progress, as other people come and go from a game in progress, and I wondered what the point of the match was if the teams weren't even the same at the end of the match as when they began. Most people's default when running a server was to turn player numbers to max and, in Battlefield's case, "tickets" needed to win as well, but just because the numbers are bigger doesn't mean that it's better pacing for a match, for instance. Matchmaking sets the defaults and ensures a pretty consistent experience from start to finish of each match.

This comment from the developer is true, too.

"Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over," Sirland wrote in a thread on X last week. "That couple of seconds when servers lose a lot of players mid-game is the only time you can join, which makes it a tricky combination (and full of queuing to join issues).

My preference for the matchmaking experience is reflected across the audience they cater to, and it contributed to an industry focus on matchmaking and the end of server browsers.

But we still need real server browsers.

If we bought a game, we should be able to do what we want with it, including running those max player/max ticket servers that run 24/7 on one map. We should be able to do it without DICE/EA's permission, on our own if we so choose, without salaried staff running master server operations, because one day the revenue this game brings in will not justify the costs to keep it going. We should be able to deal with cheaters by vote kicking them from the server rather than installing increasingly invasive mandatory anti cheat solutions that don't even fully solve the problem anyway, because it's unsolvable.