Matthew Gault on Vice:
America’s Army: Proving Grounds, a game used as a recruitment tool by the United States government, is shutting down its servers on March 5 after existing in various iterations for 20 years. After that date, the game will be delisted on Steam and removed from the PSN store. Offline matches and private servers will work, but the game will no longer track stats or provide online matches.
Once an avid player, I haven’t played America’s Army for years, but it sure feels like the end of an era.
Of course, it’s one of those “old school” shooters from the late 1990s and 2000s where you can fire up your own server or play the game offline with friends over LAN forever, like I still do from time to time with the original 1999 Unreal Tournament.
But I guess you’ll no longer be court-martialed and send up the river (i.e., banned from online play for a week or so) for friendly fire, disobeying orders, or being an asshat in general.