In the wake of the shutdown of GameSpy’s online service at the end of May, 50 EA titles are set to lose online capabilities, including enormously popular games from the Battlefield and Command and Conquer franchises.In a post on EA’s news blog, the company announced the upcoming closure, saying in part,
Since GameSpy’s announcement, our teams have been working to evaluate options to keep services up and running. Unfortunately, due to technical challenges and concerns about the player experience, we do not have a solution at this time. Online services for EA games on the GameSpy platform will be closed down at the end of June.The EA post acknowledged that a number of the games scheduled to lose support are fan favorites, and explained that while the company isn’t giving up, they haven’t reached a solution to support those titles yet.
We are still investigating community-supported options to preserve online functionality for these titles, such as multiplayer. Significant technical hurdles remain, and at this time we don’t have anything to announce.It would be nice to see EA come up with a way to continue online services to these games. 2K recently announced that it would be moving online support for Borderlands and Civilization titles over to Steamworks due to the GameSpy closure. While that probably won’t be EA’s response, given their somewhat adversarial relationship with Steam, perhaps they could find another, more acceptable option. Yeah, you guessed it — I’m talking about user servers. Patch the game to remove the GameSpy requirement, and simply let players run their own servers. Even though that might require EA to set up and maintain a master server, it would generate some serious goodwill, and EA can always use that. Obviously, this wouldn’t be an option for all their titles, but at least for the popular PC games, it could represent a second lease on life.We’ll have to wait and see what EA chooses to do. For now, they’ve listed all their titles with GameSpy-supported online features as closing down at the end of June. A partial list can be found below, focused on PC-related titles. If you’d like to see the full list, you can find it on EA’s service updates page.
- Battlefield 1942 for PC and Mac (including The Road to Rome and Secret Weapons of WW2 expansions)
- Battlefield 2 for PC (including Special Forces expansion)
- Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for PlayStation 2
- Battlefield 2142 for PC and Mac (including Northern Strike expansion)
- Battlefield Vietnam for PC
- Bulletstorm for PlayStation 3
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for PC and Mac (including Kane’s Wrath expansion)
- Command & Conquer: Generals for PC and Mac (including Zero Hour expansion)
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 for PC and Mac
- Crysis 2 for PC
- Crysis for PC
- Crysis Wars for PC
- EA Sports 06 for PC
- F1 2002 for PC
- Global Operations for PC
- James Bond: Nightfire for PC
- Master of Orion III for PC
- Medal of Honor: Allied Assault for PC and Mac (including Breakthrough and Spearhead expansions)
- NASCAR Sim Racing for PC
- NASCAR Thunder 2003 for PC
- NASCAR Thunder 2004 for PC
- Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 for PC
- Neverwinter Nights 2 for PC and Mac
- Neverwinter Nights for PC, Mac and Linux (including Hordes of the Underdark and Shadows of Undrentide expansions)
- Star Wars: Battlefront for PC and PlayStation 2
- Star Wars: Battlefront II for PC and PlayStation 2
