They’ve been putting out annual releases for a long time, and Call of Duty used to still have LAN. It doesn’t look like Madden ever had LAN, from a quick search of the old covers, which would list the features the game supported, but it was pretty common even in console games back then.
11111one11111@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Thought that was just stat quo since call of duty or madden started pumping out annual games. I never checked but I assume I can’t boot up Madden 2011 and still find servers to play on.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Can confirm, I remember when Madden introduced online multiplayer, and there was a small kerfuffle because there was no way to bypass their servers. I remember having the conversation with my buddies that it didn’t matter, because we would all prefer to play together on the couch in the same room, and playing strangers on the internet didn’t sound appealing.
jqubed@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Yeah, I’ve never played Madden online. That’s very much a couch game to me still. Not that I’ve played it much in years. I picked up my first copy in over a decade a couple years ago when it was on sale at the end of the season.
gradual@lemmings.world 23 hours ago
Which is a shame.
I’ll always be able to play World at War multiplayer because it supports LAN and player-hosted servers.
I don’t know if the newer ones support LAN or hosting our own servers, but if they don’t then it would mean we’re essentially renting access to the game’s multiplayer features.
It really means we’re going backwards just to make businesses richer than us even richer at our expense.