Nakor’s Rucksack

On March 15th, 2010, a scant 16 months after release, EA pulled the plug on the Mercenaries 2 multiplayer match-making servers. Because this was the only method to create a multiplayer game (the game does not support LAN or direct IP connections), the game now has no functioning multiplayer component.

In my opinion, EA might as well have come into my house, deleted the game and broken my disc. Multiplayer is pretty much the only redeeming feature of Mercs 2; when I’m blowing stuff up with a friend, I can easily forgive the horrible AI, weird physics, abundant glitches, terrible vehicle handling and the sometimes broken missions. Playing the game solo is almost unbearable; after less than five minutes, I’m ready to quit and a play a much more polished “blow ‘em up” game like Far Cry 2 or Red Faction: Guerrilla. It’s a shame, because with a lot of polish, Mercs2 could have a been a great game.

That said, I can understand EA’s decision. Servers, no matter how lightly utilized, cost money to run and maintain. However, it is important to understand that the servers in this case only performed a match-making service; the two players are directly connected to each other after the EA server pairs them up. Thus there is no technical reason why the game could not have supported a LAN or direct connect option. I’m sure that the fact that the PC version is a (very shoddy) console port is one of the primary reasons these options don’t exist. Another likely reason is that the developer, Pandemic, was essentially on its last legs at this point.

Not all hope is lost. There is a Mercs 2 server emulator out there. It currently does not work, but the author has hinted that he will be working on it again due to the shutdown of the official servers. No progress has seemingly been made thus far, but perhaps someday Mercs 2 will again be a fun evening diversion. The other bit of hope is that a new Mercenaries game, “Mercs Inc.” is supposedly under development. Very little is known about it, but it seems it will support some kind of multiplayer. Hopefully it will work much like Mercs 2 and allow “drop-in, drop-out” cooperative play. The fact that there is so little information available likely means it is more than a year from release, though.

Tags: co-op, game talk, games, mercs2