Last week saw the release of one of the most anticipated games to come to the western gaming market, at a time where there has been mixed success across different platforms and hopes for something big it was perfectly poised to do well – and as online gaming as a whole continues to succeed with the growth of esports emerging into different markets with options for Ethereum csgo gambling and wagers on League of Legends, a new name in a new space can only be a good thing.
The release comes from Korean developer Smilegate, and their hugely successful title of Lost Ark which had been released in Korea back in 2019 and had followed with a successful release in Russia too – the isometric 2.5D theme park MMORPG is another in the latest trend to break the mold of the holy trinity styled game in the MMROPG space and bring something new and exciting. Some changes were made for the western market particularly towards the cash shop and some more pay-to-win aspects to be easier for western markets to digest, but enough of the game has remained to get even experience players excited.
Huge success was found becoming the second most played game on Steam by concurrent numbers at nearly 1.5 million, but that’s also where the dash of frustration comes from – Amazon Game Studio were granted the publisher rights for the game in order to deliver it to the western market, but with mixed results from both Crucible and New World, there were many players who were concerned about the potential server stability and longer queue times that were seen in other games, and that’s exactly what happened – whilst the early access did show players longer queue times, the full free-to-play release only made things worse as some players in Europe were experiencing queues of up to 30,000 players with it taking up to ten hours just to get into the game. It isn’t unique to the western release as it was well known in Korea early during the release that queue times were just as bad, and whilst Amazon Game Studios are looking to address the issue, it may take some time before a solution is found.
It was almost inevitable to happen but despite the congestion issues there’s plenty of excitement left for the game – there a huge number of systems within the game that will lead to a lot of longevity in the game, particularly where the MMO market has been struggling, and could be a solid future until newer releases find their way. Almost a month has passed since the game found its release and has managed to hold itself steady at nearly one million concurrent players daily – some are still frustrated by the exhaustive log-in queues and server stability issues particularly on the original European data center, but measures have been taken steps to improve this space in particular, but current efforts have fallen somewhat shorter than what players may hope.
A quiet period will come for the game now in the lead up to the next big content update – it had been suggested quite early by developers that end game content and newly released content such as different classes would come to the game within two to three months, so many players will be in something of a holding pattern if they’ve already reached the current end game and are now waiting for other players to catch-up, but if these updates to come within the estimated time frame, then it’ll be another big drop to drum up player popularity, and a lot more content to be consumed by those who are still putting in the time to play actively.
