You have about a year left to experience the online services for seven Halo titles, if you're still playing them on the Xbox 360, or through backwards compatibility. 343 has announced that after many years, and an ever-dwindling playerbase, it's time to "sunset" the servers for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo Wars, Spartan Assault, Halo: ODST, Halo 3, Halo 4, and Halo: Reach. By December 2021, anything involving online will no longer work, which means online matchmaking won't work, certain achievements will no longer be obtainable, filesharing, and other smaller features will be gone for good. Obviously, the singleplayer campaigns of each of the games will still be fully playable offline. This sunsetting also applies to the lineup, even if you're playing them on the Xbox One, or the Xbox Series X|S. Digital copies of all of these games have also been delisted, following the announcement. For those still interested in playing these games online, there's always The Master Chief Collection, or Halo Wars: Definitive Edition, which will both continue to be supported for a long time to come.

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[FAST6191]

Re VPNs like Xlink Kai.
These get tricky on the 360. They had ping limits for games to seemingly prevent just this from happening. To this end the host at least has to be a custom software capable (so JTAG/RGH).
If you have such functionality then go for it, not sure what goes for international ping mitigation but same city and maybe same region if the hops are low enough should be doable.
If doing "could throw something and hit my friend/yell and have them hear it" LAN then that is a different matter. Hopefully you have enough viable consoles, screens, controllers and probably at some point legacy capable equipment (though I don't think IPv4 and LAN cables are going anywhere too soon)

It doesn't make financial sense to allocate server usage for games that have no online community. Presumably the vast majority of people who might've played any of these titles moved on to the MCC already, given that the 360 is now 2 generations old, keeping server resources allocated for the 200 people or whatever that might still play them makes no sense when there are newer and bigger games that would better use those resources.

I do have to wonder how much resources this might be. Quite regularly we see fans spin up things that are functional equivalents and a rounding error for most companies in terms of costs, and if server time is getting ever cheaper then a little VM humming away for Halo might not be any worse than various support forums that don't do anything 99% of the time but being software still actively used they have to be up.
Granted I would not be surprised to find it required some kind of special hardware and legacy software only setup (being MS software probably MS server OS long since left support + all their server junk that 5 people in the world know) as this would have been just before not using a VM gets you fired.

I guess there is also the "don't compete with yourself" thing to consider in this.

You see ? That's why online sucks! Always shut down like that. Waste my time and I was glad that I never used online. It is worthless. It wont be permanently anyway.

There are plenty of games where users run their own servers that are still working decades later. Indeed it used to be the standard model.

 

[Deleted User]

I try to never play online games (except for io games, which I don't really care about). e.g. Monster Hunter World? I use mods to play over LAN with my brothers. COD or variants like Insurgency? again, I don't play unless I can mod it to play over LAN.

Wish more people considered online stuff dead-on-arrival, as it will inevitably disappear like this. Or that there was a law for online games that "when it dies, open-source the server components". I never got to try Dragon's Dogma Online, and, though there are fans trying to make servers for it, they haven't been able to do much due to encrypted stuff :'(

I've been thinking of playing Halo MCC; anyone know if it has LAN multiplayer on PC? (Grumble... wish they'd bring splitscreen, which I'm certain they don't have on PC yet)

There are games which are a lot of fun online. Soccer (PES), an fps, Tekken, NFL, and even GTA V to this day.

Back in the days of Xbox 360, I'd play RDR online and kill my own partners just for the fun of it, of course they got pissed off and shot me too. lol

I did hate the assholes on GRID who wrecked everyone and played loud music thru their mics.

 

[Lumstar]

Confusing. They gave us a big chart of features that'll be turned off. Perhaps unranked online without matchmaking will still be available for a while... wishful thinking.

 

[eyeliner]

I was wondering if nder the impression that the server was basically were the stats were saved and the gaming was p2p.

But it kind of makes sense, despite the price not being a factor. They could very well deploy a virtual server and keep it running for little to no added cost.

Or just be amazing ducks and patch the games so people could use their servers, loosing the achievements progress and stats, starting those stats anew.

I wonder why the companies are unwilling to do so...

 

[Axile]

I dread the day when the servers for Minecraft consoles eventually shut down. I always liked the 3 mini-games they had (no sarcasm).
Sorry if its unrelated, it just got me thinking...

Bruv, i had the same thought, i really liked those minigames i just don't see why they would discontinue it in the Bedrock Edition update. Even if they do bring them back, the "Cross-Platform" between consoles and PC players are a huge disadvantage/handicap. Most likely Microsoft trying to create a monopoly in minecraft and I have a feeling this would not end well in the near future...

 

[BlackOmegaTM]

The thing is, Halo and Halo 2 for the OG xbox had LAN play support, and we can still play them over the internet with xlink kai and similar programs.

But some of those newer halo games have no LAN support and will be dead for ever.

Microsoft should at least patch lan play into those games before killing xbox live for then. I still play them on my xbox 360 a lot, specially because I can play with the xbox one and series x, thus I can gather 3 friends at home and we all play together.

LAN play should never have been removed from xbox games. Microsoft fucked up big on this one.

 

[Legendaykai]

good now if they axe call of duty for good then the world will be better without foul mouthed kids ruining games.

 

[FAST6191]

good now if they axe call of duty for good then the world will be better without foul mouthed kids ruining games.

I don't think it works that way.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory

There is also the line of thought that the game makes the playerbase -- if having a bad player will drag down the team then it is to your benefit to make it as elitist and unwelcoming as possible so only the strongest survive and thrive. Make the game such that any warm body is a perk, even if only a minor bullet sponge, then that changes somewhat.

Barring that and such games are harder to design -- usually games where no stats are provided and dying does not matter, say because it is a variation on the theme of capture the flag or area domination, and the cack handed drunk controller user on a connection you wonder if there is a dude waving flags around for one section of the link to your glorious high DPI mouse player that can click on someone's head in milliseconds with the server right next to you if they act as a distraction or bullet sponge then they have done something to help the goal and don't detract. Take away traditional deathmatch, team deathmatch, weapon changing gimmick mode, capture the flag, capture the area, survive the waves... and you also rather limit your audience as most don't tend to appreciate the gesture and think such modes necessities (same reason you don't tend to let them tell you what balance is -- think my favourite was a gun sounded louder than the opposing teams and despite the literal code saying damage, rate of fire, magazine size and spread was identical, because apparently that is a thing people want in their realistic games when reality is anything but the same, people said the louder one was unbalanced... inmates running the asylum).


More practically then most times I have ever flicked on voice chat in any shooting game you encounter that -- battlefield, rainbow six (vegas in my case but general applies, and the current fondness for siege means a bad player is even more of a liability -- I had a go on that the other month and while my hard won reflexes from other games saw me kill three people in one round I had no clue about the map or unique items so ultimately still lost the round after the bomb was bombed or whatever it is), unreal, gears of war, left4dead... the list can go on for a while.