Here at Ars, we often have the sad duty report on online gameplay servers being shut down by publishers once the games themselves have become too old or unprofitable. So it's nice to be able to write about a game seeing online support reinstated after years in the offline wilderness.

Today, that game is Star Wars: Battlefront 2, the 2005 PC/console third-person shooter that should in no way be confused with Star Wars Battlefront II, the PC/console first/third-person shooter EA is releasing next month. In 2014, the older Battlefront 2's online gameplay was one of many victims of the Gamespy server shutdown, which affected dozens of PC titles as well as every game on Nintendo's Wii and DS consoles. Battlefront 2 players could still connect for online matches through third-party services like GameRanger, but these lacked true integration with the game's own online infrastructure.

This week, though, has seen joint announcements on GOG and Steam that "the multiplayer function of [Battlefront 2] has now been restored AND with added Crossplay support between GOG Galaxy and Steam to boot." Up to 64 players can play through player-hosted servers on the newly updated version of the game, which is currently available for just $4 in a GOG sale (or $10 on Steam).

In the GOG forums, team member Konrad notes that "for BF2 we had access to the source code and Disney's full support" to help reinstate the online functions. He added that GOG would love to re-add online support for other GameSpy-powered games in the future, if "given the right opportunity."

Battlefront 2's online relaunch doesn't seem to be going entirely smoothly for everyone, though. The game's Steam forums are currently clogged with threads such as Online is back but I can t [sic] play it, Can't join any servers, Multiplayer crashing and Insane server lag.

Hopefully these issues will get worked out with further patching and a more robust player base willing to host stable servers on dedicated machines. We'd love to be able to point to this effort as a successful example of what can happen when platforms and publishers pay attention to players who are still interested in playing older games online.