It seems that 2020 has been the year of rough launches. January saw the disastrous launch of Warcraft III: Reforged, a game so bad that became Blizzard’s worst launch ever – as well as one of the worst in general, currently still sitting at 0.5 on Metacritic. Now it seems that Wolcen, a highly-anticipated hack-and-slash game that looked like it could even give the Diablo franchise a run for their money, has had about as bad a launch as it could’ve.
Wolcen spent several years in early access, originally launching in March of 2016. That’s just less than four years that this title spent in early access, so you would think that’s plenty of time to iron out all the bugs, right?
Unfortunately, it seems that Wolcen missed a few hundred bugs. At the moment of launch, the multiplayer servers were practically unplayable, with players constantly being disconnected, falling through the earth, or any other problem from the vast myriad of issues.
In their efforts to fix the issues, Wolcen’s developers incidentally made things significantly worse. We’ll let their official announcement, posted on Sunday, speak for itself:
“After applying a hotfix last Friday, users reported that their characters were missing, their stashes emptied, and their endgame progression wiped. Immediately we took the decision to shut down servers to prevent this from happening to a large amount of players while we find a way to fix it.”
According to the same announcement, the issue had been caused by higher-than-anticipated amounts of requests leading the database to drop. The solution to fix the issue implied rolling back to a previous save of the database from before the hotfix, which also took away progress.
There are plenty of other issues that the devs are working on, such as a considerable number of issues affecting the game’s economy. The developers end the statement with an apology and a promise to keep the player base informed on the evolution of the situation as they work towards fixes.
It’s easy as a player to sit in frustration and wonder how the developers managed to let the title end up so buggy, but it’s worth taking a moment to note how dedicated the developers have been not only to fixing the issues but also to keep the player base informed. Though the game currently sits at mixed reviews with only about 62% of reviews being positive, there are still tens of thousands of players.
Hopefully, within a month or two, the developers will have things under better control and be able to present a game without the myriad of bugs and issues. Until then, it’ll be a game of squashing bugs.
