Every game developer dreams of their title becoming the next popular game, but success comes at a price. Today, Donkey Crew, developers of Last Oasis, were forced with the difficult decision of taking their extremely popular survival MMO offline to deal with the issues.
Last Oasis launched into early access last Thursday and immediately rocketed into popularity. It swiftly entered Steam’s top-selling top 10 at #6 for the entire week despite not launching until being more than halfway through the week and ended up with more than 25,000 concurrent players.
That sounds fantastic, and for most developers, it would be nothing short of a dream. Unfortunately, Last Oasis had a great number of issues, and it seems that swiftly jumping into popularity ended up making those issues much, much worse, and significantly more obvious.
There are plenty of bugs here, your standard array of glitches and issues that large online games will have, but the biggest problem turned out to be connectivity issues. This is one of the main reasons why having such a huge player base ended up being a problem instead of a dream – with tens of thousands of players jumping onto the servers at once, the connectivity issues were greatly hindered in a rigorous stress test that they ultimately failed.
Donkey Crew did what they could to keep the servers running, but it eventually became clear that they had no recourse. Yesterday, they announced that they’ll be pulling their game offline for at least a week.
“We wanted to thank you all for your outpouring of support since our announcement last night,” the team took to Twitter to say earlier today. “We’re making sure that team members are getting some much-needed rest. We are currently going through all the logs, trying to reproduce the problems you’ve encountered. On top of that, we’re working with an additional external team of backend engineers to help us with load testing and analysis.”
At the end of the day, this is absolutely one of the last things that the developers would have wanted to do, and it shows how severe of an issue it really was if they ended up deciding to do it. Unfortunately, this could end up being the sort of move that the title isn’t able to recover from – though if No Man’s Sky was able to return from their disastrous launch, there’s hope for anyone.
Donkey’s Crew is also offering a full refund for everyone, no matter how long they’ve played the game. This presents a massive financial impact to them for sure, and couldn’t have been an easy call to make, so respect goes out to them for doing everything they can to make this as painless on players as possible. When seven days have passed, Last Oasis will return again.
