Online games are usually a mystery to me, since I don’t have the time or attention span to put into getting good at them the way all my friends who play Destiny 2 without me seem to, but I’m always fascinated by seeing them ‘end’.

There’s something always bittersweet to me about seeing an online game close its doors, either by taking the servers dark or no longer releasing updates and patches, and so on. I watched footage of people playing the last few hours of Demon Souls before the PS3 servers were taken offline, I remember hearing tales about the last few days of The Matrix Online; heck, I was even there for the last few days of the Dreamcast version of Phantasy Star Online, which was maybe the only thing close to an MMO I ever really spent an appreciable amount of time in.

This same fate recently befell the only online shooter I’ve really cared about in the last few console generations, Splatoon 2. With the final Splatfest having come and gone (and those jerks on Team Chaos ruining my dreams of a neat, orderly world where everything is as it should be), Nintendo has promised to roll out one more balance patch and an update to allow players to form their own small-scale Splatfests, and…that’s gonna be it.

Splatfests, for those unaware, were weekend-long festivals where everyone who signed up had to pick a team, generally representing one side of a friendly debate – for example, I proudly stormed the battlefield for the victorious Team Mayo during the Mayo vs. Ketchup Splatfest – and would tally up how many matches one team won to decide a canonical ‘winner’. The final Splatfest offered a choice between Team Order and Team Chaos, with the implication that the final victor would influence the plot of the seemingly-inevitable Splatoon 3, the way the final Splatfest in the original Splatoon became the backbone of Splatoon 2’s single-player mode.

As bitter as I was that Team Order lost – and not by very much, I need to add – I was probably more struck to realize that it was the final Splatfest. And that represents the sort of weird in-between ground Splatoon 2 sits at right now: a game that’s still going to get another update and will be available to play online for the foreseeable future, and yet one that’s no longer as…organic as it once felt. After that final patch, there’s literally nothing new to look forward to until Nintendo announces they’re finally taking the whole thing offline, whether that’s when the new game launches or when they discontinue Nintendo Switch Online for whatever comes next.

Playing the game is still as fun as it was on launch day, when I took it to my dad’s house to dog-sit and did nothing but level up for six hours, but knowing there will never be another Splatfest (and that the plot of the third game has probably already been decided) the whole thing feels sort of…hollow. Like walking through a mall you used to go to all the time, except a bunch of the stores closed and you don’t recognize anyone. I’m having a great time playing the game, but between the constant butt-kickings I’m being handed by high-level Japanese players (as, in my experience, there seems to have been something of a drop-off in Western players sticking with the game) and the sense that nothing is going to be unique or different in the game ever again after a certain point, it’s going to start feeling more like an exercise in pre-emptive nostalgia while we all wait for Splatoon 3 to drop.

Of course, as a way to get me excited for Splatoon 3, everything is going exactly as planned. Of course I’ll buy the new one on launch day. Maybe I finally do know how MMO players feel.

It’s a unique feeling, this, and not one that people used to deal with back in the days before live updates and multiplayer-focused titles. But now that so many games can be considered living, breathing organisms, it’s strange to know that eventually the shiny new adventures will stop coming.

I better go play Doom or something to cheer myself up.

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