Why did LAN gaming die?
 

Used to be back in the day, there were so many games you could LAN with. Now a lot of them have headed the way of the cloud/p2p/service based matchmaking and left out the lan option.

Me and my friend would like to find some good lan friendly games but they just don't seem to have a market for it anymore.


From the age of wolfenstien, doom, descent, quake, unreal tourny, warcraft 1/2/3 Command & Conquer (before the franchise went to shit) it used to be a pretty decent menu

now? FPS has gone up to a larger scale than simply, "shoot the other guy as many times as you can before the 15 minutes is up"

now there are objectives, vehicles, huuuuge maps which make 4-8 lanners very lonely when they're designed with like 24-32+ players in mind.


DOTA has gotten so so so old. there are a lot of games that imitate dota but in the end, it's still dota, what DOTA does right is that if a player gets stomped, they still get to play

in RTS games, if a play gets stomped, they're left spectating and being bored and contemplating going home and starting that downward lan killer vibe until the other players finish thier match, invariably there is some guy who built a mega turtle base. drawing the match out to 3 hours between the final 2 while everyone else sits around or starts in another game.


Honestly the last 3 times I tried to host a LAN (which was years ago) it just seemed most people wound up logging in to WoW and pissing me off. (but I just wanna do mah dailies! pout pout, goddamn nerds)


anyways, Small Shooters are popular cuz you just respawn and stay in the action despite your skill level. RTS would be a lot more popular amongst my friends if they had more respawn like mechanics, I guess it's the "Hero" mechanic that makes DOTA work, though I can't really call it an RTS, not sure..

Tower Defense games are fun but don't really have the draw to make people pack up their computer n shit just to play some TD

Borderlands was the last good candidate for a lan game to me, but I think it was ruined by the cross platform mess. I had people who picked it up for console and only a handful that picked it up for PC.

I think the PC player limit was too low at 4 players.

meh, maybe I should just get all my friends on Steam and spend my time trying to get them to buy the same games that I play, i dunno.

frustrated.

any suggestions?

Dawn of War and its expansions are pretty good for Lan parties.

Battlefield 2, CS:S as well.

Shauk,

I feel your frustrations, bud. The days of my buds and I packing up the comps and playing "Serious Sam" seem to be long gone. I think Steam is really the best bet, unfortunately. With vent/skype/beer it's not the same, but, it's probably as good as we're going to get.

Ever play and pen & paper anymore? Yeah . . . me neither. Gone by the wayside!

LAN's can be extremely frustrating but we still do it anyway from time to time. The last one we had consisted of lots of Heroes of Newerth(Dota minus Warcraft), maybe some Starcraft and then people started drifting to other things solo or not, but as long as your in the same room its still pretty entertaining. We had Borderlands on the 360 with a bigscreen right next to the main table of computers, I think there was some Guitar Hero and if I recall the night ended with someone pulling out the SNES and retro gaming began. The real key to the successful LAN is in the organization beforehand, and not just food etc, but in making sure you have a decent to large selection of games that EVERYONE OWNS A COPY OF, and that the network will work properly. I've had more LANs ruined to those two things then anything else. As for FPS games, we used to just create a local server and expose it to the internet to let other people join and play, it wasn't perfect but it let us get somewhat larger games.

Battlefield 2 is great for LANs; we still play it from time to time.

I can't remember what all we played at the last LAN party we had a couple years ago, but I do remember we all installed Age of Mythology for old time shits and giggles, and played a few rounds of that.

I have some great Xbox lan parties playing Halo when I'm in South Africa. Broadband is still kinda scarce there so lan is the way to go! My buddy has access to the media room at his church, so we often hook up to crazy audio and multiple projectors (4 players per screen)... beer, pot, and pizza in church is always fun. It's the only time you'll ever find me there...

Yeah I hear all the battlefield suggestions and I must say I have a LANBoner for how BFBC2 is turning out, march will be awesome :)

The LAN center I used to go to kept getting ripped off. Rivalution, Thunderdome, and a few others got ripped of, too, iirc. We still have smaller parties from time to time, but it's nothing compared to maxing maps with everyone you know.

Anyway, as bandwidth continues to grow, LAN parties became less and less about going to a place where LAN parties are possible and more about community... but LAN folks like us are okay with long-distance eCommunities.

Basically when everybody got broadband, LAN gaming started dying. Why lug a huge gaming rig around for 5 ping when you can get 30 ping at home? I guess there's the social aspect of it but social interaction is pretty overrated.

I loved LAN parties, but everyone went because playing games with your friends over 56k (more like 48.8k) was terrible, and 10/100 Ethernet was amazing by comparison. I might get about 20 ms higher nowadays being physically connected with Ethernet, but most times it's not worth toting my whole rig around. That said, I do have a big LAN party with coworkers once a month using work laptops; they're terrible machines, so we end up playing Counterstrike 1.0 and BF1942. Still amazing fun.

Yeah I guess I'll have to start a Steam Group and see what happens.

I still do lans occasionally, but we have always played sims: Il2, Nascar mostly with breaks for COD, old unreal tournament and counterstrike. Those old games are still fun, run on everything, and its nice to get together with ppl once or twice a year.

Call of Duty is really good. There are lan parties out there. I think most of them are private though. You just have to find the right people. Try craigslist.

pshaw.... ethernet??!?!?!? MIDI Parties!

because people stopped playing MIDI Maze....

I still do LAN with buds on some FPS just so we can curse the computer enemy out and have a good time. BUt mostly I game online so I can play with longtime friends and my brother across the country. Thank god for the internet.

Lan had its day, but it too is obsolete.

What is the next gaming revolution?



Makes me relish the days of being a kid and saving quarters to play real arcade games at the 7-11 cause all I had at home was dirt and rocks.

obsolete? pfft

This is a demonstration of society's loss of humanity!

:P