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by rglullis 1690 days ago
Do people still have LAN parties?
3 comments

> Do people still have LAN parties?

I averaged one or two a year through the 2010s, but my last one was in early 2020 for obvious reasons.

While most games can be played over the internet these days and voice/video chat is now accessible enough that the experience can be pretty close, in the end there's still nothing like being in the same room as your friends when you're either cooperating to take down a raid boss or taunting them after a headshot.

Exciting news for Halo: Infinite on this front, the Xbox folks can join you as long as they’re cool with playing against the mice and keyboards.

https://www.pcgamer.com/halo-infinite-will-let-you-use-your-...

And maybe more importantly, LAN multiplayer actually exists in case of ISP problems, server outage, or trying to play the game in 20 years when the official servers are long gone.

AFAIK the same has worked in Halo: MCC for as long as that's been available on PC. I've certainly been cross-playing my replay of the campaigns, rotating between PC, Xbox One, and XSX based on whatever I'm in front of at the time.

It is nice that Microsoft finally acknowledged a few years ago that their consoles are Windows devices that have USB ports and stopped disabling keyboard/mouse support. The idea that console users were banned from better FPS input for years was just nonsensical.

Now if only we could get them to mandate keyboard/mouse support instead of making it optional. There's no good reason to force console players to not be able to aim properly.

I know someone who's building a mini ITX computer with one of AMD's APUs for convenient LAN party travel, so it's a non-zero number! Been years since I went to one.
I had one a few weeks ago for the first time in probably a decade. It was so much fun that we're going to try to organize them more frequently.