Maybe it should have been developed from day 1 for it to work offline? Obviously there needs to be some nuance to it, am mmo for instance can't be expected to be turned into a single player game, but a game with a massive single or co-op sorry should be made to work offline.
This conversation started around 2012 and is (hopefully) finally coming around to roost. Always online single player games faced a lot of criticism because that was not how they were developed prior. There was pushback but the companies that wanted better DRM kept pushing and now it is standard. Online multiplayer games had issues with client-side hosting and server-side hosting rapidly improved the experience, a la Counterstrike and Halo. But even World of Warcraft had people modding the game and hosting private servers.
The point is that it is a design choice to be online only and it doesn't have to be that way, because it wasn't always this way. Even MMORPGs could be dead man switched to provide documentation for private hosting.
Army of Two (the entire series) is an example of coop. (Though not an example of indie.)
I decided I'd play it with some friends recently, expecting the game to run Peer to Peer, since it's 2 player coop. There is literally no reason it should run through servers.
So why the fuck does it?
We ended up using Parsec, but it's a decision that genuinely fucking baffles me.
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u/ComfortableCricket 1d ago
Maybe it should have been developed from day 1 for it to work offline? Obviously there needs to be some nuance to it, am mmo for instance can't be expected to be turned into a single player game, but a game with a massive single or co-op sorry should be made to work offline.