https://www.polygon.com/2017/12/23/16814482/dmca-mmo-exemption-made
Game preservations/archivists have been petitioning the U.S. Copyright Office to grant a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) exemption for online video games (specifically MMO’s which require an online server) as the office performs a review of its anti-circumvention rules (a procedure it does every 3 years).
Back in October, Gamasutra noted that the copyright office recommended that all exemptions to the DMCA be renewed. One of the exemptions was relevant to museums, libraries, and other archival efforts which require circumventing the DMCA in order to preserve games (where they must be in a playable state) that require a server check that is no longer available. The current exemptions apply to games that do not require am actual online server though (i.e. MMO’s where the game server contains most of the logic).
This may sound confusing but it is really straight forward. There was a time (before current MMO designs were the norm) during the 90’s and early 2000’s when games made calls to a home server to verify the license/game key. The game logic however was still part of the application binary on the players computer. Circumventing this server check is what was exempted.
This newer/ongoing petition is meant to extend to being able to preserving defunct MMO games. This is obviously much more complicated because of the fact that the bulk of a game logic is handled server side. This exemption would require access to the actual game server code/binaries or require lengthy reverse engineering to emulate the game.
One such request was made by MADE (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment) of Oakland, California where it would extend the exemption to online MMO’s where museums, libraries, archivists, and preservationists could operate servers for ones that have been discontinued by their publishers.
I am personally 100% for this. I would also be in favor of a provision that would allow players the ability to download their character data and that the developers of such abandoned MMO’s be required to make their game server core untethered from the publishers business systems so that this base core can be released as a local binary (allowing a player to at least play their characters completely offline).Similarly, the advent of online only has meant that many of these games are constantly evolving where they can no longer be played in their original state (there is a point where such major builds should be forked off so that those particular versions can still be played offline with a specific client build).
While not an actual MMO, a perfect example is Diablo III vanilla. Even vanilla itself underwent significant changes post version 1.0.3 when the
initial Paragon system was added in patch 1.0.4. The biggest changes came pre-Reaper of Souls though with the 2.0.x builds where changes were made with “loot 2.0” as well as revamped class changes. The 2.0.x. builds should have been forked off while the 1.x builds should have “preserved” for eventual “offline” archiving.
For those who didn’t follow D3’s development early on, there was a time when the game was going to have an
offline single player option (this post, I had links to Incgamers blue tracker archive which acted as source material but they eventually took it down; it had a lot of great snippets which I haven’t been able to find archived elsewhere unfortunately). The earlier 1.0.x clients logged some things including a “supports_offline” variable which was a remnant from an unexposed option for the ability to play a local binary version of the game engine.
I brought this up including the Mooege emulator (something someone created during the games initial closed beta test for what was essentially the starter version of the game, a way to just spawn into the beginning part of the game with mobs and loot that weren’t close to the actual game code) towards the
tail end of this post. Mooege was meant to give players a feel for the enviroment and the characters (their animation, movements, and base attacks) and whatever coding that did exist, turned out to be an interesting proof of concept.
But that also revealed how difficult it would be to actually reverse engineer and re-create a faithful emulation of the actual game. Everything needed to be recoded from scratch (items, loot tables, monster abilities, NPC functions, dialogs, quests, waypoints, etc). Normally, hackers are notorious for taking on such challenges but the amount of core changes that were made to Diablo III, made it an ever moving target (plus Blizzard hardened security). Blizzard builds their newer games on their own social/networking platform called Battle.net and utilizes protocols associated with it.Some folks were trying to utilize the Xbox 360 version but that hardware runs on a PowerPC variant (the PS3 being even more difficult with Cell). And since neither PS4 or Xbox One have been cracked, getting to those local binaries is not in the cards. These are all pretty much why even 5 years after launch, there hasn’t been a full working vanilla emulator.
D3 Reflection is one of the few long running efforts to get a vanilla version (plus the scrapped PvP arenas working). It’s vanilla since it is likely still based on this old Mooege code. It too probably is not going to be a 100% perfect recreation. plus way too many players would prefer a Reaper of Souls setup in terms of the adventure mode component.
