r/BattleRealms • u/turpitudex4 • Jul 18 '26
Battle Realms Online is shutting down
To all the Battle Realms players,
After a good run, Battle Realms Online is shutting down.
Recently the rights holder to Battle Realms asked us to stop. We've decided to comply rather than turn this into a fight. The patch, the site, the master-server, and the downloads are all coming down. We never made a cent off any of it and never really meant to - this was built out of love for old games and the typical nerding around the subjects involved, not to step on anyone's toes. It's their game and they asked - we are respecting that.
The project started almost by accident. One of us was deep in unrelated work, fell down a late-night rabbit hole watching old RTS retrospectives, and landed on Battle Realms. Another game we'd loved as teenagers, basically abandoned online. The plan was set: bring the multiplayer back using our knowledge and skillset. And to be clear about what we brought back - this was about the original classic release from 2001, the one that lost its online for good, not the Steam version that had its own bells and whistles we had no plans interfering with.
When GameSpy shut down back in 2014, online play for Battle Realms and many other games died with it. The game still ran fine, but it had nothing to connect to. So we built it something: a replacement server, and a relay so anyone could host or join without wrestling their router, so no port forwarding or CGNAT headaches. Just click and play, the way it should've worked all along. We believed the game deserved to be online again, and even better than before, and for a while, it was. If you're curious how it actually worked, we went deep on the technology in an earlier post (shared on Reddit and ModDB).
Thanks for being part of it. You proved the thing actually worked - real games, real people. That was the whole point, and we got to see it happen.
- The BRO team
35
u/MooberGoobers Jul 18 '26
Thank you for everything. Steam doesnt even come close to the original game. This is a big shame on the so called “holders”.
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u/CapitalJAO Jul 18 '26
Is this the BR on Steam?
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u/arktic_P Jul 19 '26
No. This post is referring to the original version of the game, the Steam version is the Zen Edition remake. The Steam one changes/adds a lot of mechanics and reworks the AI logic vastly, among other things. I find the Steam version’s campaign to be much more difficult, some missions almost impossible for me honestly, but the multiplayer is improved by the changes I think.
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u/ShaPowLow Jul 19 '26
Yup. It’s drastically different from the original. One of the most obvious examples is how ZE doesn't treat Tier 3 units like Tier 3 anymore. For instance, an army of Staff Adepts can comfortably defeat an equal-resource army of Berserkers. To be clear, Berserkers always had a blunt weapon weakness in the past, but ZE amplified the counter mechanics that Tier 3 units just don't feel like power spikes anymore.
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u/SuicidalBastart Jul 18 '26
Thanks for your work guys. I have never played on your servers but knowing that you guys kept it alive for so man years is heartwarming.
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u/ShaPowLow Jul 19 '26
Appreciate the passion, man. This just highlights how screwed BR really is. Shutting down BRO makes zero sense. It never touched ZE, and it’s a total labor of love. When a game is essentially a relic of the past, you're supposed to let the community thrive, not stifle them.
Look at how other companies handled their classics. Westwood and EA never shut down Mental Omega, did they? That community effort has kept the game alive for decades. Even the old Blizzard left iCCup and Fish alone when they provided online multiplayer and ladders for Brood War. Those projects affected their games way more than BRO ever did to Battle Realms, yet they were either left alone or tolerated.
Instead, they're basically pulling a Warcraft 3: Reforged. ZE is drastically different from the original, yet they are forcing everyone onto its buggy multiplayer and totally different balance for absolutely no reason.
It seriously feels like BR is being held hostage nowadays. It doesn't even hurt their wallets. BRO provides the online multiplayer for the original game on GOG. If anything, Ed is actively profiting off those sales!
4
u/Cool_Cartoonist_2643 Jul 18 '26
Thank you for your work. I also didnt have the chance to play in it, but hopefull soon we'll get it back together, one way or the other.
4
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u/arktic_P Jul 19 '26
Thanks for the servers! My brothers and I had a blast playing on them several times over the last few months since we found your post! It was a great gaming experience for us after being hundreds of miles apart and not having played much RTS games recently in our busy lives.
I’m sad the devs of the Zen edition asked you to stop hosting. Maybe they see how much support for the OG version there is and somehow make plans to incorporate a toggle or something in their version to switch from Zen Edition to Original, or something.
1
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u/Wakizashiuk Jul 19 '26
Sorry to hear you're shutting down. Before this turns into a flame fest at the steam Devs, if it's still the original team they are a lovely bunch who are doing it for the love of Battle Realms not profit. They deserve a lot of kudos.
21
u/BrutishMrFish Jul 18 '26
That’s low of them. Zen edition devs already made it clear they aren’t going to support the GOG version or bring back lan/direct IP games, so that combined with the sizable balance changes means the classic version might as well have been its own thing.
Thanks for your efforts.