The Death of SWAT (Not So Fast)

A couple of days ago I made a commentary post about the perceived death of one of my favorite tactical shooters, SWAT 4. This post was entirely accurate in that the previous developer Irrational Games and publisher Sierra Entertainment have folded. What I did not point out is that the existing SWAT 4 game (along with the expansion pack) can still be played online.

The in-game server browser was powered by GameSpy and that went under several months ago making the creation and joining of a SWAT 4 game impossible without the aid of a third party modification. Unfortunately the most popular mod that could do this actually disabled the single player capabilities of the engine so it was a complete no-go for me.

However the game has dozens of active servers running through the X-Fire gaming service, and I was able to join several servers this evening and play against others without issue (other than the requirement of having the game disc in the drive). Hopefully some of my gaming friends that are interested in SWAT4 will see this post and check out X-Fire (a free application that tracks game play time).

This is what you currently get in the game when trying to browse for servers.

The X-Fire SWAT 4 servers list as of this evening.

A big holy crap moment as I have not been in an online game in years.

And after all that time I go find a broom closet to camp in.