Lost Planet 2, Capcom’s sci-fi third-person shooter that’s a little like space Monster Hunter with mechs, massive aliens, and sweet, sweet T-ENG, has spent years in a purgatory of neglect. As one of the countless games left in a state of disrepair after Microsoft discontinued support for its universally despised Games for Windows Live, Lost Planet 2 was made unavailable for purchase on Steam in 2021 so that Capcom could “investigate the matter.”
Yesterday, almost four years later, Lost Planet 2 received an update on Steam that finally exorcised the lingering curse of Games for Windows Live. Unfortunately, the update also broke online multiplayer and wiped out local save files for anyone who still had it installed.
Microsoft released Games for Windows Live in 2007 as an early attempt to offer a combined multiplayer service and games distribution platform for PC games by building off the Xbox Live ecosystem. To put it generously, GFWL sucked and was bad, forcing the players of afflicted games to contend with a clunky Windows Vista-era user interface well into the 2010s and beyond.
As developers and publishers abandoned or replaced GFWL in favor of alternatives like the now-ubiquitous Steamworks, Microsoft started deprecating support in 2013 the closure of its GFWL PC Marketplace. While Microsoft never officially killed GFWL for good, its official stance is that it will “no longer provide customer support for Games for Windows Live.”
Not all games that shipped with GFWL integration were lucky enough for their developers to invest the time to properly remove it, leaving them with varying degrees of functionality as the service continued to degrade. In the case of Lost Planet 2, lingering GFWL detritus left it and other Capcom games of the era with broken installs, keeping the game from running properly as it tries and fails to install GFWL from a software repo that Microsoft no longer maintains.
Even after it was delisted on Steam, however, players who already owned the game managed to find workarounds to get it running, but even games with beloved multiplayer modes don’t tend to fare well when nobody can buy it and every installation is busted by default. So when a Steam update appeared unannounced, remaining Lost Planet 2 diehards celebrated the discovery that GFWL had, at long last, been removed.
That celebration only lasted as long as it took those players to realize that the monkey paw had curled: GFWL was gone, but LP2’s online multiplayer had been removed with it, and everyone’s local saves had all been obliterated. “Well, it was a step in some kind of direction,” one user said on the Steam discussion forum. “Not sure if it was the right direction, though.”
Guides have already materialized with instructions for voluntarily downgrading LP2 to restore GFWL and online multiplayer, which all feels like the punchline to some greater, cosmic joke. Some players are optimistic that, because LP2 still hasn’t been returned to Steam listings, it means Capcom’s still working on an eventual Steamworks update. If nothing else, I admire that they’re still able to hope.
My dreams are more sensible: I just want to fight an akrid in Monster Hunter at this point.
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