I tried to play moreDragon Age: The Veilguardlast night. Despite itsshallow, button-mashing combatand itsshallower, boring writing, I’m enjoying it. It doesn’t feel like a Dragon Age game –the accents aloneare enough to make me feel that way – but it’s a nice enough fantasy action game to play while I switch my brain off of an evening.
The reason I said that Itriedto play more Dragon Age last night is because I couldn’t do it. I turned my Xbox on, I pressed ‘A’ on the Dragon Age tile on my home screen, and it booted me out of the game. Error0x80832003. Can’t connect to the server. Great.
I couldn’t play Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game I bought and own. I couldn’t play any games I downloaded from Game Pass either, but that was kind of expected. Microsoft has to check that my subscription hasn’t lapsed or something. But a game I own, that is installed locally on my console and has no online components? Why do I need to connect to the Xbox servers in order to play it?
In the end, I turned my Xbox off and went to bed to read my book. My mum would probably be proud of me for doing that, but I really wanted to be playing Dragon Age. I’ve only just finished Act 1, and I’m keen to explore further with Lucanis and Emmrich by my side.
What happened to gaming? I know online requirements are nothing new, but it seems like everything is going backwards. I yearn for the days when you could just slam a disc into a drive and get playing. Now we have day one patches to download, updates to install, and prayers to say to the server gods.
From my research online, the Xbox servers were down for everyone last night. Could nobody play games? Was every Xbox Series X a £500 brick in every living room? A glorified DVD player, for those weirdos like me who still like physical media. And not even that if you have a Series S. It’s just a shame that my commitment to tangible products hasn’t expanded to video games, or else I would have tried a physical game to see if it worked. Honestly, I doubt it would have. I could launch all the games installed on my Xbox, but was kicked from each when they automatically tried to connect to the Xbox servers.
There are a few ways forward here. Firstly, Xbox needs to invest in better servers. More efficient, more consistent, more numerous, whatever. Outages like this are infuriating, and a company that spent $68 billion on acquiring another studio should have the cash to invest in ensuring players can actually experience the games it clearly cares so much about releasing on the platform.
Or we could look to the past. Remember the Xbox 360? I could play that without even being connected to WiFi. In fact I did, when I switched off my parents’ router to stop procrastinating and study for my A-Levels. I’m not going to tell you how many hours I put into Skyrim during that time, but I did enough revision to get a place in uni, so everything worked out in the end.
What I don’t understand iswhygaming has regressed so much. What do games companies or console manufacturers gain from requiring you to connect to their servers to play a game on their platform? Is it something to do with uploading save files to enable cross-save on different consoles? Is it just because it uploads my screenshots to the cloud? Because I can live without those things. I can live with waiting until I have an internet connection to sync my saves or access my virtual photography on my phone.
Gaming has moved forwards over the past decade, but in many ways it has gone backwards, too. We just want to play the games we own, no matter whether Microsoft’s servers are online or not. Is that too much to ask?
