Area 51 is a 2005 first-person shooter made by Midway (RIP) and later made free thanks to a sponsorship by the US Air Force (yes, you read that correctly). Although it received middling review scores at the time, the free release caused many people to try it and come away impressed with its lifelike CGI cutscenes and gameplay-altering plot twists. Also notable is the unusually high-profile voice cast, which includes David Duchovny, Powers Booth, Marilyn Manson, and even Nolan North in one of his earliest roles.
Over the years, the game has acquired a number of quirks and compatibility issues on modern hardware and operating systems. A previous restoration effort, Project Dreamland, formerly solved many of them, but this project is now several years old and has itself fallen out of compatibility on Windows 10⁄11. I also found its approach to be overcomplicated and unsustainable for long-term preservation.
Thus, I set out to make a new preservation project …
When New World first launched, it peaked at 913k players. However, the daily peak players has almost dropped almost every single week since the game launched and content updates have done little to prevent the bleed out of players. Yesterday, the daily peak players was just 98k, representing a drop from its peak player count that is slightly 89%. (Source: https://steamdb.info/app/1063730/graphs/)
Now, if these 98k peak payers (or even 48k during off peak hours) were all concentrated in a few servers, this would not be an issue, you would still find people to play with. Except, new world had hundreds of servers at launch with 2k concurrent player caps, with AGS telling players to pick medium/low pop servers to avoid queues. Well, here is an example of a server that was previously “medium” pop: https://newworldstatus.com/worlds/lintukoto. As you can see, during off peak hours you frequently see <100 players (meanly you will barely find anyone in this MMO) and even during peak hours there are barely more than 300 players max.
Wanted to let people know since I was pleasantly surprised to be able to use my name with Icelandic characters when creating a new user account for Windows. Then Minecraft and Slay the Spire wouldn’t launch. Managed to change the name and that worked for Minecraft but the devs of Slay the Spire told me that I had create a different account to play their game on.