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Comment by unfocso | Hacker News Reader

The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber.

No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles.

In 2026 I can still insert any used disc I bought in my ps3 and it will generate a (offline) client-side license for me and let me play and update the game with the disk inside just as a "proof" of still owning it.

If I'm online I'll get patches, else I'll just get served the version on the disc.

(Btw, ps3 also has a print spooler and can natively rip CDs and serve them while acting as a NAS. Or, you can stream games to your psp with remote play. It was truly a "let's cram everything we can inside" era and more like a proper pc with a mediacenter interface)

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> PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working

That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:

https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...

Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...

To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.

Seems like ps3 was kind of the sweet spot in terms of decent graphical capability, being allowed to actually own your games, patching, and online capabilities. Given the backlash we’re seeing towards the console giants and their desires to kill off physical media, I wonder if a console with the features mentioned above could be released today with any chance of being competitive? Does anybody know of any projects like that?

It doesn't matter because there wouldn't be any games released for that console. Large studios can make much more money by extorting the consumer.

I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way.

I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.

Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.

Worse: there's unpatched RCEs for Modern Warfare II: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-10718

Valve needs to grow a bit of a spine here.

The Call of Duty series is one of the worst offenders, effectively every game outside of the last 2 years has so many bad CVEs' and remote code exploits that even opening them on your PC is unsafe. Playing the official matchmaking on even something as recent as Black Ops 3 will have your computer compromised in minutes.

Yet they are still on the store front, they never go on sale. Black Ops 2 has been out for well over a decade and still wants full price for it on Steam & its unsafe.

Playing Call of Duty games on PC is probably the most unsafe thing you can do with your computer, outside of downloading malware itself.

Valve should delist these games from the store if they are effectively unplayable. They should ban Activision from selling new games on the store if they cannot make older titles even remotely safe. It's pure neglect, most of this stuff is fixed by the community with a few lines of code.

I'm not necessarily doubting what you say, however please could you provide us with a citation? The allegations you make appear quite serious.

We can't really expect public multiplayer experiences to remain the same across time, but surely you can play it in a LAN style.

> all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves.

FWIW this had its own share of problems, most common being host migration (when the host leaves) and less often, although a bigger problem, is your IP address being given to all players and malicious actors DDOSing the host to make a match unplayable.

I remember PS3 Call of Duty online play being very unreliable compared to Xbox Live. It didn't use relay servers, so the host needed port-forwarding or upnp, which is a dubious situation to be in.

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