Old Games Kept Alive By Community?

[Spacedeck]

Is BF2Hub still working?

I remember a few years ago (probably at least 5 ) there was a project to get the game running standalone but EA put a stop to it, was that BF2Hub?

BF2Hub works just fine and plenty of players still play. Upon looking online, there used to be one called Revive for BF2, I read though it didn't get shut down by EA. I don't know if that's the one you're thinking off but I swear there was another which was shut down but based on a different BF game, not BF2.

CoD2 and CoD4 are still on the go with frequent LANs, another oldie kept alive by the community is a terrible mmo called Thang Global. It's changed hands a few times but there's a newer version out now.

Sadly the terrible CoD sales has pretty much killed my hope of playing the older titles, I refuse to pay the asking price. I only play COD2 as I have the disc.

 

[Gary*]

CoD4 is available for free now, look up cod4x though I do agree, even the newer cod titles are ridiculously priced

 

[LizardKing]

Grand prix legends still has a decent community. Released 98.

 

[Quartz]

A guy on YT goes into old games to see how they are doing today.

Doom and Freespace 2 come to mind.

 

[BUDFORCE]

I used to play Natural Selection which was a HL mod and really bloody good, better than Counter Strike in my opinion, but that has gone.

We had a good community and did try to revive it at one point, but turns out for technical reasons wasn't all that easy and ended up being so much hassle to organise it wasn't worth it.

 

[HangTime]

Quakeworld (the multiplayer variant of Quake) has a small but highly active community, still playing high end tournaments. I went to a LAN for it Sweden in January.

What's really impressive is how much work has been put into the server/client over the the past 25 years since ID stopped updated it. Quakeworld has the most feature rich client of any FPS game I've seen... fully customisable HUD, advanced scripting, thousands of console commands/variables etc.
Serverside, they've added multiview demos (plus a web front end to so you can just watch them automatically converted to video stream without even needing to load the game), QTV, automatic proxy rerouting to improve ping, solid mod for competitive play etc.

It's obviously not going to compete with modern titles on graphics but it's really moved on a huge amount. What's interesting is when you compare it to the Quake remaster that came out a couple of years back, the remaster is SO far behind what the actual community is using. I mean even 10, 15 years ago what we had was a lot more advanced than the remaster.

Considering how old/small a game it is, production standards of streams from TastySpleen etc are really high. People who stumbled across it were commenting how much better it was that streams for modern games.

The sad part I suppose is that the player base is pretty small, measured in hundreds. Action is heavily focused around European evenings, you typically won't get a 4on4 match during working hours or much past 1am.

 

[Spacedeck]

If anyone is interested in any of these games mentioned in this thread, I've added them to the OP and with some links I can find about the community side of the game.

 

[henry hoov3r]

Some exellent games to have a look at in this thread!

HALO 2: being worked on with Project Cartographer.
Battlefield 2: available through BF2Hub, don't play too often but still installed.
NHL 2004: still seems to have a modding community that bring out updates on the roster and such, pity there isn't a newer/better NHL game on PC.
Grand Prix 4: Did anyone play this? Community still going over at grandprixgames.

I only thought the other day I wouldn’t mind playing BF2 again. I tried 3 through game pass but kept having issues with punkbuster.

 

[Teknobry]

Someone posted here a while back on keeping SOF2 MP alive.

Favourite game of my entire 49 year existence.

It was great, I'd be tempted to get back into it again. If you find any details post up

 

[CapitalOne]

It was great, I'd be tempted to get back into it again. If you find any details post up

Here's the thread - enjoy (if it's all still up and running)

Soldier of Fortune 2 - ClanBase - OSP

Hi, My name is vithos and about 15 years ago I was a kid pwning noobs on a game called sof2, we used to play on clanbase 5v5 ctf + 5v5 inf, opencups, eurocups, and other leagues. This is just an awareness post to let people know that we currently have a community of ~300 discord members with...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

 

[LostCorpse]

freelancer - https://www.moddb.com/mods/crossfire (this was the mod i was thinking of)
Total Annihilation - https://www.taforever.com/
wildstar - https://www.emulator.ws/ - WIP
Earth and Beyond - https://www.net-7.org/ - i was sad to see the News article : https://massivelyop.com/2023/04/09/...erver-project-may-be-the-space-mmo-you-crave/ (but goes to show security is important)
Echovr - https://github.com/Xenomega/EchoRelay - its a reseach project server but im sure some one will pick it up at some point.


Star trek bridge commander : https://www.moddb.com/games/star-trek-bridge-commander/mods
The Matrix Online -
City of Heroes

 

[tamzzy]

If anyone is interested in any of these games mentioned in this thread, I've added them to the OP and with some links I can find about the community side of the game.

that's an excellent idea!

can i add the GOG link for MOO2 as well please: https://www.gog.com/en/game/master_of_orion_1_2

 

[LostCorpse]

CoH https://wiki.ourodev.com/view/Main_Page
TMO - https://mxoemu.info/
Earth and Beyond (Earth & Beyond Emulator Homepage) *possibly no longer active, not checked myself* - Net-7 Status - Partially Rebuilt - https://forum.enb-emulator.com/index.php?/topic/13139-net-7-status-partially-rebuilt/

Does The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
quallify as well?

 

[Spacedeck]

Does The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
quallify as well?

Not to me . I wanted to concentrate more of the obscure ones people remember, who may not realise the game still has a community going for it. Plus there's a reason for not adding others like GMOD or LFD, games pretty much everyone already knows about and are in their own right very popular even today. Then there is disc based games, those released before Steam codes became a thing, some which may have received a re-release since the digital age.