Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

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What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie. Before Halo 2, even games on XBox Live followed the same foundations as PC games - a bunch of servers listed in a browser that you had to pick from to join, then instantly relay the details to your friends so they could also join. Bungie developed a matchmaking system that made it effortless to play with friends, and it was soon used as a bedrock for XBox Live and copied by PC developers quickly. Peer to peer worked with everybody using broadband and was cheaper than running servers.

That has led us to our present moment where the developer controls the life of a multiplayer title from cradle to grave. They issue patches you have to apply; they balance weapons, they ban players, they charge for cosmetics and loot boxes and season passes. It all traces back to giving up control over how we connected and played games together.

Nowhere is this more evident than the Battlefield community. The majority of that community desperately wants a game that really follows up on Battlefield 2, without realizing it will never happen because EA as a company is too big to cede that much control over its multiplayer titles. They wouldn’t be able to monetize it if the community controlled as much as they did back in the day.

Multiplayer games with dedicated, community servers were very special. If you frequented a server, it wouldnt be long before you made friends with the people on the server.

I made many good friends in the battlefield 2 and team fortress 2 days through a couple dedicated servers. People to this day are SHOCKED at how many friends I have on steam.

It's because we all showed up at the same time to play games together, in commune. It was our coffee shop. It was our church.

These days, most people don't even use a mic/chat let alone friend someone.

"What killed the LAN party? In short, Halo 2 and Bungie."

I still played halo 2 and 3 at Xbox LAN parties. So existing groups didn't really go away, but I could see there being less of a draw to new groups forming.

Would everyone bring their TV set?

Yep

Edit: each person bringing a console also brought a TV. We would have up to 4 people per console.

Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies.

I guess many people stopped investing into expensive pc gaming rigs when consoles became more popular. And work provided them with a Windows laptop.

"Ah, split screen. No option for covert strategies."

Not so. Each console/TV was a team. So you could only see your teammates.

I'm legit skittish about having to reinstall or update windows on my PC because I don't have convenient access to my Battlefield 2 discs and there's a good chance an old friend of mine will be trying to get me on an AIX match any random weekend. I made it to Windows 10 and this machine cannot go to 11 anyway so I'm fairly safe for now.

An update to Battlefield 2 with fairly open servers (and an ability to mod) would be an amazing game and platform. But yea it would have to be coming from somewhere else I have no hopes on EA.

For us it was WoW that killed it.

I distinctly remember several of my friends dropping out of our LANs due to their WoW addictions. It was sad. Eventually, it became about half of the group, and the LAN parties stopped.

The internet killed the LAN parties.

It was too much work and decent internet gave you the games without the effort.

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