Today the indie ARPGWolcen: Lords of Mayhemleft Early Access behind and launched into full release.Wolcenis a unique take on themodern ARPG archetypedefined byDiablo 3andPath of Exile, offering a massive 3-act story campaign as well as cooperative multiplayer and a robust endgame. But Wolcen Studios may not have been prepared for the kind demand PC gamers have for ARPGs, asWolcenis currently dealing with a barrage of issues.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhemlaunched mid-morning and within an hour its developers posted a message about ongoing authentication issues. The team pointed to the “massive amount of players trying to connect” to the game. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Wolcen Studios has an answer for this other than to wait and let players continue to slowly log in through the bottleneck. The server issues ended up being just the start ofWolcen’s launch day problems, though.
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Within minutes of its first update regardingWolcen’sserver issues, the team also acknowledged “several different error messages” which players could encounter at various points while trying to start a game. At the time, theWolcenteam said the errors would resolve alongside the server congestion. However, shortly thereafter againWolcenmade a decision. The team decided to disable certain “network features related to your friend list.”
Since then, theWolcenteam has remained transparent about the game’s issues and how they were being corrected. The team has apparently upgradedWolcen’s server capacities and is working to address the other problems. In the past four hours, the team has said thatWolcen’s authentication issues are “progressively being resolved,” and that upgrades to the “servers and server capacities” are being rolled out. The dev team says the hotfix should be pushed “in a few hours.” This last update was made at around 4:00 pm PST.
Of course, everyone familiar withpost-launch connection issuesfor games with multiplayer functionality knows that things don’t always work out as planned.
Wolcen: Lords of Chaosisn’t a huge game, in terms of development resources. Blizzard is a huge developer and even it had major launchissues with its servers whenDiablo 3first came out. SinceWolcen’s multiplayer functionality wasn’t available in Early Access and only became available today, it’s understandable that there would be problems. Anyone that routinely buys indie games knows that this is just the nature of game development.
Wolcen Studios has done a great job of being open and transparent about itsARPGWolcen: Lords of Mayhem, though. If technical problems are inevitable, being honest with players is the least a studio can do.Wolcen’s server issues may not be solved immediately, but it’s clear players can count on the game’s developers to be quick about communicating the status of the game.
