Unlike the emulated vanilla variety that has been happening unofficially (some of which Blizzard had shut down legally), Blizzard intends to bring all of that into a modern operating environment when it comes to not just development, but how the infrastructure works (databases, how the game world and instances are spun up, etc). Just as they found challenges with remastering StarCraft, this is an even more daunting aspect with recreating the original 2004 vanilla experience without inadvertently changing it as a result of doing it in todays development and deployment environment.
Outside of WoW, there are unsurprisingly quite a number of crowd sourced private server efforts happening with various MMO’s. Many of the Korean ones (due to weak security) are “reverse engineered” by capturing (packet sniffing software) the network interaction between client and server and then recoding as much as possible (thus not clean room reverse engineering). Depending on how the game server was written, “decompiling” that code isn’t difficult in order to re-create a server that existed at that particular time. There are also some very rare cases (uncommon due to strict access control) of the actual game server binaries that were stolen (internally by individuals who had worked at a publisher in countries that do not necessarily have the highest respect for intellectual property).
A good number of these private servers aren’t 100% faithful replications but they do end up running similarly to the real thing. Operationally, many of the backend processes are run in a VMware Windows virtual machine like the real thing (doing it this way allows the entire environment to be self-contained). And if you provision the setup at a datacenter, well you basically can run them as a service with the exception of needed a more robust database implementation than what some folks ended up utilizing in some private servers. Word of warning: I would not recommend rolling your own public service because of the legal consequences regarding intellectual property (copyright/trademark violations, etc).
There are naturally some games that are being operated out of countries that operate under different rules of law/do not comply with international laws/do not recognize the DMCA. Continuously funding operations for a publicly accessible private server is a major issue since payment avenues are restricted. Plus once money begins to exchange hands over intellectual property rights infringement, it becomes even more imperative that the rights owner protect them (else lose those rights). One such game that has drawn the ire of Trion Worlds is a private server version of ArcheAge. Previously, there was only a Russian version but ever since Trion got wind of a version that is now targeting the North American and European crowd (ArcheRage is several versions behind at 2.9), they made it clear they would be looking to take legal action.
I’m presuming they will be working with XLgames on this since Trion is just licensing the rights to publish ArcheAge while it is XLgames that owns all copyrights and trademarks to the actual game. Still, the way Trion’s staff responded in the above shows just how threatened they feel (in terms of economic loss) about this private server which reveals just how much the live versions are tuned to extract excess sums of money out of players wallets. Sure, free 2 play games need to make money BUT the problem is how many publishers have monetized these titles with blatant cash grabs as well as the whole loot box angle.
Digressing, what I am more interested in is running such private servers for personal offline use like specifically being able to experience content from an older build. I want to run a close approximation of the original version of TERA for example in order to experience/better appreciate the original Island of Dawn starter zone and story line (both of which have been removed since 2014 with the Fate of Arun expansion) since I barely played the game at its initial launch even though I did purchase the collectors edition at the time. Since most publishers aren’t going to expend the extra expense to operate such legacy style servers, the only way to accomplish that now is by creating and running an emulated version of it.
I’m currently setting up my own private servers (emulators) for Vindictus and TERA (the issue with both is getting all the necessary downloads including the required client version). None of these have an easy turnkey solution; even the most current releases have some minor hoop jumping to get working locally. Setting up these private servers for local access use doesn’t require a whole lot of technical knowledge BUT having working knowledge of basic networking, the Apache web server, some base database knowledge, and some basic desktop computer skills all help to make sense of the instructions that go along with getting all the pieces together and then making the proper edits to get everything up and running.
Both of these games I am attempting to setup locally also aren’t close to the current game in terms of content. For TERA, that really isn’t an issue since I’m looking to run a private server build that runs content from pre-Fate of Arun. I’m also looking to run a Fate of Arun version with Crusades, Alliances, and Sky Castles enabled (if I can find one that exists). As for Vindictus, I just want to play a version unbound from Nexon.
Finally, it was not surprising that I could not find a Devilian private server effort taking place even though it’s a perfect candidate since Trion’s version hasn’t seen much content update. Logic tells me I should start capturing all in-game actions to at least have data to work with in the future but I’m not that motivated yet to spend that much time in the game until I actually know what they plan to do in 2018. Hopefully the DMCA amends the exemption to cover MMO’s since that will give me some ammo to then lobby for that game to then be preserved should it stop being actively published in the near future.
