Amazon plan to increase European servers with a brand new area
Despite Friday’s wonky launch, Lost Ark change into the second-most-played recreation on Steam ever over the weekend. The free-to-play action-RPG hit 1.32 million peak concurrent gamers on Saturday, narrowly pushing it previous the all-time peaks of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. Well, 1.32m have been in-game, however they won’t have been enjoying. Server issues continued after launch with lengthy queues for some. Publishers Amazon say they’re engaged on it, together with planning to create an entire new additional European server area.
Barely quarter-hour earlier than Lost Ark was because of launch on Friday, Amazon delayed it, citing “deployment issues”. It ended up launching 4 hours late aaand 20 minutes later Amazon took the servers offline once more for quarter-hour because of repair an issue with lacking characters. This continued throughout the weekend with Amazon taking down or restarting servers whereas resolving issues with the whole lot from public sale homes to infinite loading screens. And queues to affix servers remained a persistent drawback.
One of Amazon’s plans to resolve that’s to launch a brand new European area. That’ll be wholly seperate to the present Central Europe area, and take additional work with the builders, Smilegate. “Due to the game’s architecture this is the only way to accommodate more players in Europe so it’s a joint effort between Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG,” Amazon clarify. And being a separate area means different points.
“Please note that this will be a distinct new region (separated from Central Europe) without cross-region play availability,” Amazon warn. “This also means that region-wide features, such as your Royal Crystal and Silver balances from Central Europe will not be accessible in the new European region. The new region will be ideal for players who have not yet created their character or haven’t otherwise committed to stay on their existing server.”
That weblog submit additionally particulars a “launch celebration gift” they’re planning to supply to all gamers, with a mount and a load of chests. Anyone who performs between the time the brand new area launches and seven:59am on March 2nd will get that.
I had hoped Amazon can be higher ready after the server shortages after they launched New World in September 2021, however even they in all probability did not anticipate Lost Ark can be certainly one of Steam’s hottest video games ever. And not solely as a result of it is simply, like, high quality.
Our Lost Ark review-in-progress summarised it: “excellent Diablo-like combat struggles to make up for a grind levelling process baked into a cookie-cutter MMORPG template.” Alice Bee in contrast it to Diablo II too, and located it wanting. But hey, it is evidently ok to recover from 1,000,000 folks clicking in unison.
