Usually when a game studio makes an official announcement about their servers, it’s bad news. Generations of multiplayer games have already gone the way of the Dodo. It becomes obsolete regularly as the years go by, making the effort to stay online unjustifiable. With any luck, a band of devoted fans will keep a great game alive on his private server.
This is the case with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the beloved class-based FPS created by Splash Damage as a standalone expansion for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. In a rare example of good server news, Bethesda has spun up a new dedicated server for Enemy Territory with six original his maps and a completely vanilla ruleset. As of April, the game is also on vapor (opens in new tab) For free.
“The community has hosted and continues to host servers with various mods and custom maps that we highly recommend, but we also understand that many players want a more nostalgic experience. We are,â id wrote. Post an announcement (opens in new tab)“We have set up servers in multiple regions so that players around the world can play with relatively low ping.”
There are actually four dedicated servers, one for each officially supported region ID to be exact.
- USA: Texas
- EU: Netherlands
- Australia: Canberra
- United Kingdom: London
These regions should cover most places you’d be interested in playing a 20-year-old FPS. However, “relatively” low ping is correct. Servers in California to Texas probably get 90-100 pings. This is an acceptable latency, but much higher than the average ping of 20-30 for a new shooter using a server based in Los Angeles.
Here is the official ruleset for dedicated vanilla servers:
- Game type: Campaign
- Max Players: 16 (8v8)
- Friendly Fire: Yes
- Punkbuster: No
- Anti-lag: Yes
- Maximum Life: Off
- Weapon Limit: Off
Enemy Territory was probably one of the first “free to play” multiplayer shooters released as shareware by id Software in 2003 (no microtransactions). Splash Damage will eventually reveal the Enemy Territory source code to the world as well, opening the door for fans to run the server and modify it to their liking in projects such as: ET: Legacy (opens in new tab).
The new servers are undeniably good news, but I’m wondering: Why? Is there a hidden motive, such as an impending announcement?
Or maybe it’s much simpler than that. I hope someone id asked Bethesda/Microsoft to spend a few pennies worth of Microsoft to breathe new life into a dead game.
