EA lists games affected by Gamespy's shutdown, no alternate solution

[MentalIlness]

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/37657...y-s-shutdown-no-alternate-solution/index.html

As stated previously, GameSpy will be shutting down its operations, leaving many games' multiplayer support in the dark. While some publishers have presented alternate solutions, EA has listed the games that will be affected by GameSpy, and may use it as a reason to retire certain popular games.

While EA did provide the list of games that will be affected, which includes 24 PC titles, it isn't clear whether it already has a plan for an alternate solution. "Since GameSpy's announcement, our teams have been working to evaluate options to keep services up and running," posted on the EA blog. "Unfortunately, due to technical challenges and concerns about the player experience, we do not have a solution at this time. Online services for EA games on the GameSpy platform will be closed down at the end of June."

Regardless, EA acknowledged that there is a concern that the old fan favourites game will not have multiplayer support. They said ,"We know some of these games are still fan favorites, including Battlefield 2, Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Command & Conquer games. We are still investigating community-supported options to preserve online functionality for these titles, such as multiplayer. Significant technical hurdles remain, and at this time we don't have anything to announce."

There are some games from EA that has third party solution. Battlefront 2, Command & Conquer 3 and Battlefield 1942's multiplayer is supported by GameRanger. What's strange is that EA didn't present any solution for games such as Crysis, Crysis 2 and even for Neverwinter nights 1 and 2.

The list of that will be affected by Gamespy's shutdown are as follows:

• Battlefield 1942 for PC and Mac (including The Road to Rome and Secret Weapons of WW2 expansions)
• Battlefield 2 for PC (including Special Forces expansion)
• Battlefield 2142 for PC and Mac (including Northern Strike expansion)
• Battlefield Vietnam for PC
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for PC and Mac (including Kane's Wrath expansion)
• Command & Conquer: Generals for PC and Mac (including Zero Hour expansion)
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 for PC and Mac
• Crysis 2 for PC
• Crysis for PC
• Crysis Wars for PC
• EA Sports 06 for PC
• F1 2002 for PC
• Global Operations for PC
• James Bond: Nightfire for PC
• Master of Orion III for PC
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for PC and Mac (including Breakthrough and Spearhead expansions)
• NASCAR Sim Racing for PC
• NASCAR Thunder 2003 for PC
• NASCAR Thunder 2004 for PC
• Need for Speed: 2 for PC
• Neverwinter Nights 2 for PC and Mac
• Neverwinter Nights for PC, Mac and Linux (including Hordes of the Underdark and Shadows of Undrentide expansions)
• Star Wars: Battlefront for PC and [FONT=inherit !important][FONT=inherit !important]PlayStation[/FONT][/FONT] 2
• Star Wars: Battlefront II for PC and PlayStation 2

 

[QuantumPion]

• Master of Orion III for PC

I lol'ed.

 

[lupi]

Battlefield 42 and Battlefront main ones I'd miss see going.

 

[darkewaffle]

Nobody playing NWN has used Gamespy in years anyway because the "Master Server" died 3/4/5 years ago and was never restored because the games were and are still basically abandonware.

Also at some point support ends. To be fair, BF1942 was released less than a year after Windows XP. BF2 is nearly a decade old.

I don't know how the games work aside from NWN, but at least with NWN gamespy was nothing more than a "GUI" of sorts which basically polled available/registered servers and put them into a directory listing. Multiplayer in the game itself still works without any problems, the only difference is that connecting to the server has to be done manually through the "Direct Connect" dialogue (via an IP address) or through history/favorites. Point being, for NWN Gamespy was not particularly important to multiplayer and it works without it.

 

[Bateluer]

Nobody playing NWN has used Gamespy in years anyway because the "Master Server" died 3/4/5 years ago and was never restored because the games were and are still basically abandonware.

*snip*

I don't know how the games work aside from NWN, but at least with NWN gamespy was nothing more than a "GUI" of sorts which basically polled available/registered servers and put them into a directory listing. Multiplayer in the game itself still works without any problems, the only difference is that connecting to the server has to be done manually through the "Direct Connect" dialogue (via an IP address) or through history/favorites. Point being, for NWN Gamespy was not particularly important to multiplayer and it works without it.

Came in here to say this. NWN is still being played on various modules, but afaik, almost none are using Gamespy.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

i'm surprised gamespy lasted this long. it was pretty terrible ever since it changed from qspy. gamespy arcade was a bloated mess. all seeing eye was so much better.

 

[Throckmorton]

Technical hurdles? Why didn't they just keep Gamespy running?

 

[natto fire]

I am all about criticizing EA making bad decisions, but am honestly impressed they were still supporting BF '42, it is over a decade old, and it is not like they are sending out kill codes to the software, just shutting down the multiplayer service which made it easy to find games.

 

[maniacalpha1-1]

To all those who supported bf3 and say that "bf2 is still there for you", this is a big blow to that position.

 

[JEDIYoda]

I am a die hard Quaker and I can honestly say GameSpy??? arr arr arrr......

 

[Joeydubbs]

"Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for PC and Mac (including Breakthrough and Spearhead expansions)"

That brings back some uber memories...

 

[shortylickens]

I love Battlefield 1942. That was back when I still enjoyed EA games.

Any chance Steam will pick up hosting for some of these?

 

[Stuka87]

I am surprised EA was still paying to keep the service running at all. I think they deserve props for supporting something that is so old for so long.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

EA's solution: buy newer games that require origin. If those don't exist: sucks to be you.

 

[SPBHM]

BF 1942 still have well populated servers,

much older games are still played online, no reason to kill multiplier games, just "open" them to alternative servers or whatever... it can't be that complicated/expensive,

 

[darkewaffle]

Technical hurdles? Why didn't they just keep Gamespy running?

Gamespy is not part of EA, it's a third party solution. However Gamespy was sold a few years ago (to "Glu Mobile") and the new owner doesn't seem that interested in continuing Gamespy's 'hosting' operation. I think they raised the rates significantly and Glu also states that quite a few of the games/companies contracting Gamespy's services had gone for as many as four years (as of 2012) without paying for the service.

Theoretically you could tear Gamespy out and put some other tool in it's place, but that's not an insignificant amount of work for what is basically legacy software at this point. Further I'd probably argue that most people still playing those old games probably have at least the elementary knowledge needed to simply connect to their chosen servers directly over IP still.

Just to be clear, this is not a problem specific to EA games was not caused by EA. Any publisher/developer of any game which used Gamespy services will be affected.