Legacy Servers

Classic WoW will release August 27th, 2019

The release date of Classic World of Warcraft has finally been announced, along with the release of the beta the day following the announcement. So I figured now would be an appropriate time to write about a rather new concept for the MMO genre, legacy servers.

Legacy servers for MMOs are servers that host an earlier version of said game. This can come to be as a result of high player demand or developer obligation when transferring their game to a significantly updated version. Usually the likelihood of a legacy server coming into existence by the original creators is slim, but does increase with age. For this reason private servers, illegally hosted versions, are made to help quench this demand.

And who can blame them? When you buy a game you buy it for what it is, that iteration, and arguably changes to said game is a valid reasoning to be dissatisfied with the product. However MMOs are a bit different, well, their nature is anyways. Massive MULTIPLAYER Online games do not have their players in a vacuum, rather they play with hundreds of thousands of other players, and satisfying a single individual is not on the table, and usually is not even realistically possible. Creating servers for every version of an MMO AND keeping the same “feel” of the game cannot be done, after all other players are part of the experience and splitting them up would be less than ideal. So for years an MMO will be updated pushing away and bringing in players, until a significant demand for a particular version is reached, at which point the team behind the game may consider re-releasing an older iteration as its own entity.

Examples of these types of legacy servers include the upcoming Classic World of Warcraft and the 2007 version of Runescape. Interestingly enough a vote had to be made by the players before Jagex, the company behind Runescape, went through with creating legacy servers. This shows Jagex may have been unsure if a legacy version was even financially worth it. For many years Blizzard was against creating legacy servers for World of Warcraft, spawning the infamous quote “You think you do, but you don't!”. 

So what has changed? Why is it now that we are seeing a demand for the resurgence of older MMOs after close to two decades? When will we start seeing a demand for legacy servers of modern MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 and Guild Wars 2? What comes after the release of a legacy server? Should it be updated or forever remain the same?

Well for the first question I think as my personal best guess, that there has been a generation gap. The games that children played 15-20 years ago are different than the ones played today, and as MMOs are constantly updated developers will make changes to try to bring in the newer generations. One can argue that older games are more grind heavy, unfair, more based on long term goals and modern games are more based on instant gratification and faster paced action. If this is true it should come to no surprise that there is a generation of people with different desires than that of the current generation. This mixed in with MMOs unique nature of typically needing to be constantly updated, the game one played 15 years ago could be radically different today, despite falling under the same banner. The kids 15-20 years ago are now adults, and chances are they still play video games. We have a generation of adults who are not satisfied with the current trend of MMOs, and chances are the same thing could happen in another 20 years.

So what should be done regarding legacy servers? Well it’s a hard question to answer. People want different things, specific versions, specific expansions, etc. There’s no one “right” way of going about this for all MMOs; I think each MMO will have to consider their audience and make the decision for themselves.

Creating legacy servers out of a sense of obligation may not be a financially viable choice. Runescape has had multiple iterations of its game, and even before the creation of Old School Runescape there was a legacy server one of its first versions, Runescape Classic, a MUD based game. It closed down August of 2018 after about a decade of running. However it should be noted that it lacked any support and it didn’t accept new players very often. There is also Haven & Hearth which created a legacy server when they made the transition to 3D, similar to Runescape, and also like it, does not have very many players despite both being time capsules. If Classic WoW remains unchanged for its entire lifespan, it will be fascinating to see how it compares to other legacy servers, given WoW’s popularity.

           

Runescape Classic

On the business side of things, what seems to work is Old School Runescape’s approach of updating from that version in a different direction than the original. While Old School Runescape initially had a lot of players, it quickly dropped until the developers began re-adding old and new content. If it had not it could have very well died much like Runescape Classic. The only experiment to test this would have been done was to release 2 versions, one that will forever remain the same, and one that will change over time, both being released side by side. Unfortunately creating something akin to archiving these legacy servers is not something many developers are willing to do.

It’s a shame really that old versions of many MMOs will forever be lost to time, and those that are not may not be the same due to a lack of a player base. You can’t just pop in an MMO and play it like a single player game, a server must exist, and for it to be truly alive its community must be there to. Initially when I began writing this piece I was going to say “Ideally the best course would be to have both a legacy server that never changes AND one that does release side by side”, but now that I look at this subject more deeply, I’m not sure. The ideal is still the same, but that does not mean it’s feasible or even worth it, why should developers pay to essentially archive a dead MMO? Even support for these games cannot last forever…  Perhaps in 20, 40 years from now there will be some kind of tax funded library for games, which includes MMOs where students of the future can research and study them.

Despite these questions with no easy answer (or perhaps answers that we may not want to accept), there is one more thing to look forward to in the future. While many may view this surge of legacy servers as an appeal to a different generation, it could also be seen as a demand for a different philosophy in game design. We can learn things from our past. As we age and newer generations come to make games, some ideas are simply lost because they may have never experienced the things we have. For example, the very concept of an in-game mailbox as a game mechanic may become lost as newer developers grew up with instant messaging. As Dungeons & Dragons was the inspiration for many of the earliest MMOs, old MMOs became the inspiration for the newer generation. But if a demand for older MMOs can create legacy servers, perhaps the developers of the future can learn from the past to create even better games.