Sounds worth a shot at least. Thanks for the write up.

I could be sold on it. Is it super random like Mario Kart, or do they avoid the likes of blue shells?

Crysis 3 wasn’t a trainwreck. It wasn’t as good as Crysis 1, but few games are.

It’s an original game. Many assets are not original. Many others will be. This is a very normal part of game development. As much as “asset flips” were an issue back when the Steam floodgates opened, people seem to have really misunderstood what the problem actually was.

The thing I’m criticizing is that they make this other kind of server impossible, even though it would be exactly the kind of backup plan you’d want for a situation like this one.

It would help people who wanted to have a functioning video game. Then you could ask your friend (or someone on Discord) what their IP address is and play with them.

I’m not mixing anything up. If they allowed for things like direct IP connections, you could still play Baldur’s Gate 3, online, regardless of this downtime. It wasn’t organically that we arrived here. It’s objectively worse.

You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur’s Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.

Then beyond that, you’ve got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don’t even connect to Sony’s servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty’s multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony’s dime. And beyond that…the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony charges a subscription fee for any and all network multiplayer traffic.