Wolcen: Lords of Mayhemrecently launched on Steam after several years of Early Access. The ARPG has been compared to bothDiablo 3andPath of Exile, iterating on design and gameplay that ARPG fans want more of. It’s hardly surprising then thatWolcenhas proven an incredible success. For comparison,Wolcengarnered more concurrent players thanResident Evil 2 Remakeat launch. Sadly, but not necessarily unsurprisingly,Wolcenwas completely unprepared for the wave of new players at launch.
Just hours afterWolcen’s launch, theWolcendevelopment team began reporting a variety of server issues. WhileWolcen’s dev team was very transparent and communicative about what was happening, no solution was immediately available. Eventually, theWolcenteam confirmed that online servers would need to be taken down for maintenance so that they could be upgraded. That was a full day ago, with the game having launched only two days ago.
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The most recent tweet on the officialWolcenTwitter account confirmed the lengthy extension ofserver maintenance. “We continue our efforts day and night with our partner to bring back Online servers,” the account clarifies. It also provides a time of 12 pm UTC Sunday for the earliest servers might come back up. That, unfortunately, does leave room for further delays if necessary.
One thing that needs to be made abundantly clear is that the state ofWolcenprior to the maintenance was unsustainable. The servers were frequently disconnecting if players were able to connect to them at all. TheWolcenteam appears to be doing everything it can to remedy the situation, however, server issues genuinely depend on partner services and are completely out of developer control.
Regardless of the problem and regardless of any empathy players might have forWolcen’s development team, this isn’t a good place to be. Two ofWolcen’s first three days of full release are going to have online servers completely down, while the other day had struggling,buggy servers. Players are paying as much as $40 for a game where a core feature isn’t available. This situation may have been unavoidable, but it still sucks.
For the time being,Wolcen: Lords of Mayhemplayers aren’t entirely removed from the game.Wolcenhas anoffline modethat, by all accounts, appears to be working well enough. The game still has 50,000 viewers on Twitch and that’s not even the highest its been in the past day. It’s true that its numbers appear to be shrinking due to the server issues, but once those servers are going again the popularity may return.
