Last week, we learned that 168澳洲幸运5开ꦉ奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will require an Internet connection at all times, even when you're playing it single-player. That's bad news for players, and even worse news for game preservationists.
For most of my life, this kind of requirement wouldn't have affected me. I had access to solid internet through high school, college, and my first few years post-grad. But from August 2018 to the beginning of 2020, I didn't have Wi-Fi at all. When my wife and I got married and moved from Michigan to Illinois, I quit my full-time job as a reporter at a daily newspaper and switched to trying to make it as a freelance writer covering games. At first, I made basically no money, which meant that expenses that weren't strictly necessary, like Wi-Fi, had to go.
During that time, I never played multiplayer games unless I was reviewing them. I've always been more of a single-player person anyway, so it wasn't too big of a deal. We live on the property where my wife works, so I would just haul my PS4 over to another building, where I had a cheap tiny TV set up and play there. It was annoying, because I had to do this anytime I needed to download a new game or update an old one, but it was manageable.
But it did prevent me from getting into certain games I would’ve loved. I got Hitman 2 as a Christmas present in 2018 and was stoked to play it. But if you weren't connected to Wi-Fi, IO Interactive gave you a significantly worse experience. You could play through the campaign, but none of your progress would save. Unless you were connected to Wi-Fi, you couldn't unlock new starting locations, new items, new weapons, new costumes, new anything. Due to the studio’s decision to make the trilogy perpetually online — a decision that seemed unnecessary then and now — I couldn’t play Hitman 2. It kept me from getting into a series I would eventually love. Many players live in parts of the world where they can’t access good Wi-Fi, and these kinds of decisions broadly keep them from engaging with these games.
Obviously, there are plenty of games where being online is a necessity. That’s just how multiplayer works, and it’s great that it can let you keep up with a friend living across the world. A few years ago, I reconnected with a college friend living in Thailand by playing Risk of Rain 2 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Left 4 Dead together. But, if a game has a campaign that can be completed single-player, there's no excuse for it to require an Internet connection at all times. Features Editor Ben Sledge recently argued that video games aren't accessible for the working class, and the requirement that players have a good Internet connection for games that don't actually need an Internet connection is another datapoint in favor of his argument.
But that isn't the worst aspect. Though it's unfortunate for individual players, it's worse for games as a medium. The history of games is riddled with the corpses of titles that required an Internet connection and, because their studios have stopped supporting them, are unplayable today. Gylt, the survival horror game which was one of Google Stadia's only exclusives, is currently unavailable in any form. The developers have stated that it will get a multiplatform release this year but until that happens, a game that came out, that people paid for, and that was entirely single-player, is completely unplayable — at least by legal means.
This frequently happens to online-only games. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Matrix Online shut down in 2009, but has been preserved (to an extent) by dedicated players. Even then, you can't actually play the game. You can explore its world, but you can't do quests or engage in combat. What was once a thriving MMO based on a hugely popular sci-fi property is now essentially an empty museum piece. There's even less available for games like Lawbreakers, Radical Heights, TERA Online, EverQuest Online Adventures, MapleStory Adventures, and many more. Those are all multiplayer games, and it's a sad financial reality that when the developer or publisher doesn't want to or can't devote the resources to keep a game online, they often become defunct.
Forcing a game with a single-player campaign to always be online is pushing eventual obsolescence onto something that could otherwise be preserved. Unless Rocksteady adds the option to play offline, Suicide Squad will stop being playable when they stop supporting it. That's a blow to games history, a blow to the developers who have spent years of their lives working on it, and a blow to players who might want to revisit a game they loved. Ironically, for a game whose anti-hero stars have explosives implanted in their brains to keep them in line, the game can only stay alive as long as those in charge allow it to.