Most games go offline with at least a few month's notice, but Guerrilla and Sony has pulled the
Killzone Mercenary servers with apparently no warning, unless someone made a mistake.
Pulling the servers, fair enough for an old game that presumably only a few people pay, fine. But, without any warning? That's rather unfair, even if Sony is looking forward to PS5 and Guerrilla trying to push on with the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn (Killzone's developer Guerrilla Cambridge was shut down in 2017).
UPDATE: The servers are back online, no official word on time-limits or if this was a crash or mistake! Whatever, get playing while you can and show Sony we all still love the Vita and Killzone!
Original story continues: Yes, we can still play the Botzone MP mode, but that's not the same as the characters, experts and welcoming Vita community that built up around the game, happily fragging and Porcupining each other for hours on end since 2013.
The
MP stats page is still up, so grab any details you can before that likely vanishes, and enjoy the lovely heat maps and those quirky valor decks that were just one of the clever game features. Otherwise, this is just another game vanishing into the night, but as the best shooter on the Vita and any portable by some distance.
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| Game error man, game error! |
Of course, Sony is all focused on the
PS5 launch, so this was to be expected, but some warning would have been cool, and really how much does it cost to keep a couple of cloud servers up and running these days? Especially one that looks like gorgeous on a near 10-year old handheld.
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| First view this morning, still magnificent in Botzone |
For everyone else, the Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified servers are still going, and there's a huge generation of modern PS4 games we still remote play, but Mercenary was our own little world where maniacs on high-spec PCs or 120fps displays and a greased laser mouse couldn't have an unfair advantage.
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| Stab, stab back, that's how personal these servers going down is |
Anyway, Killzone joins the likes of WipEout 2048 and many more in losing its multiplayer element, just a part of being a modern gamer, I guess.
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| Just another ghost of a game that people used to love |
