For a quirky MMO that nobody had heard of until The Game Awards 2022, Wayfinder has done something exceptional. The title from Austin developers Airship Syndicate and publisher Digital Extremes slipped into Early Access on 15 August. After a brief hiatus between beta tests and something of a social media storm, the colorful adventure set out to blow us all away. It then proceeded to break in spectacular fashion.
We got a chance to talk to AJ Lasaracina, Director of Marketing and Engagement at Airship Syndicate, while at Gamescom 2023. We talked about what exactly happened, how you handle a launch that nobody predicted, and how the crew behind this title felt about the first few days of the launch.
AJ confirmed, as if it’s news, that the team is feeling, well:
“Bad. Yeah. So, we responded to the launch challenges that happened immediately. As of 5 days after Early Access launch, we’ve been non-stop working with Digital Extremes in terms of servers, infrastructure logging in. There are so many issues that we have to overcome.”
Wayfinder hit Early Access on 15 August 2023 and pretty much instantly broke servers. While the team behind this well liked MMO did perform beta tests and were definitely watching the social storm, they had no idea quite how popular Wayfinder would be. Despite the fact that it will eventually come to storefronts in a full free-to-play form, players seemed to want to pay and play early.
“Yes, it comes with being a studio that's new, but it also comes with being a studio that just didn't understand the demand,” AJ tells us. Even after the first few days of demand and constant server queues, AJ estimated players levels to be something around, “20,000 to 25,000 people looking to play.” The game might have made a bunch of noise online, but MMOs tend to make assumptions based on a range of measurements. AJ confirmed that Airship did, “have launch models and you have projections, you have ideas and like those were out the window 15 seconds into the game.”
One of those models comes from preregistrations or pre purchases. With Early Access, Wayfinder didn’t have an opportunity to understand how many people were ready to put up and play, meaning Airship Syndicate only found out about the problems when their servers face a torrent of requests. The number of players wasn’t the only issue according to AJ.
“We were basically requesting too much player data at the same time, which was talking back to the server, and it was just being bogged down and slowed down.”
Not All Numbers
Not all the issues Wayfinder hit were entirely down to the Early Access rush, however. Some were a consequence of design decisions taken by the team, and still the overwhelming player demand.
“One of the things we want to do from the beginning is give players the least amount of friction when playing,” AJ says. He continues, “In Wayfinder, you download the game, you select play, it asks you to agree to the terms of service, and that's it. You're done! You don't make an account, you don't select a server, you don't log into a console network. It's all done in the back end. What happens with us is because there is no regional server in the traditional sense; it's like that one elastic mega server that can scale up or can scale down, you don't pick EU or Americas region.
It gives us a great sense of community, but the problem for us was that because that software was not able to scale at a rate that we could keep up with, not only did the login servers essentially melt, the software wasn't able to effectively move up or down based on the population that we had because it was constantly talking to the client itself.”
While the underlying AWS infrastructure might have been fine, Airship Syndicate couldn’t simply throw money at more servers to fix the issue. Like many areas of the Internet now, Evenor is as reliant on code as it is on cabling in the data center.
To say that Airship Syndicate has been through the wringer for these decisions is an understatement. The team confirmed they’ve been working non stop and AJ noted that they are, “rewriting a lot of that,” code that we discussed. A patch for the problems was imminent during this interview. Even a few days after the explosive launch, things were starting to settle down.
Transparency
However, you can’t just fix a problem and expect the fallout it to go away. The people impacted, and the players who shell out money are all going to react. Some of you that were trying to log in back in mid-August might have seen AJ’s letter to the community. He describes the night everything launched where everything blew up and said, “We're still working super late, and then I just started typing up a letter to the community and I started with. ‘This sucks’.”
The letter this discussion refers to can still be found on the Wayfinder website, and as AJ points out, while it might seem unpolished, “It should read like a stream of consciousness because that's what is from the whole studio. We want to be honest. We wanna tell people what happened. We told them that the servers have sized the queue up because. We started this game about it being a conversation with players about wanting to build something with them.”
That’s not where the transparency ends, either. The latest update on the Wayfinder website shows the login attempts in stark detail and the process of deconstructing a week of technology hell.
Moving On
While that’s a pretty direct approach, and Airship Syndicate certainly hasn’t burned player patience, there’s still tons to do in Wayfinder.
The game itself launched into Early Access with 7 characters, 17 weapons, and six areas to explore. AJ confirmed that the plan is, “every three months we are going to stick to having a new character as well as a new weapon. We'll have drops in between a season's content. What we want to be doing in between seasons is dropping new content, such as boss fights. Right now, we have three new weapons ready to be added to the game and a whole bunch of new quest lines, expanding the main story. So, we were adding a bunch of content that we have planned that's outside of the main seasons.”
This isn’t all set in stone, now players are in and Airship are looking at feedback, and the team recovers from launch, timelines can shift. That’s evident in the fact that AJ confirmed Airship don’t have a set release cadence quite yet.
“It's not like we have to hit two or three content drops in between the season. It's really what makes sense for the story and the character.”
As things look further out, there’s no telling what the plans for Wayfinder are. When I prodded about aspirations to drop full on expansions or break away from the console screen, nothing seemed off the table. Just take a look at the current Wayfinder Roadmap to see what’s currently top of the pile.
AJ: “We also want to continue producing content like the Venomous anime, where we're telling those character stories inside the game and outside the game.”
While I couldn’t get any definite answers, it seems like there might be more animated shorts coming, when AJ confirmed that there are plans to bring more of this unique world and its new characters beyond the game world. While they wouldn’t give us any more details, Airship was happy to talk about the big E: Expansions.
“As for things like expansions or larger scale, We'd love to do it in the future, I don't know when that is. We have to launch first, but we have thought about it. We thought about what does that look like? Is it a brand new land mass? What are the large features that we have to add? They should feel interesting and they should feel meaningful, especially because we're going to be adding so much content each individual season. There are so many questions that we don’t know the answers to yet.”
After wrapping up our time with AJ and the rest of the Airship Syndicate team, I’m pretty confident that whether Wayfinder fights back the Gloom or crashes fabulously, the players are going to be strapped right into the seat riding shotgun the whole way. If you missed out on playtime, you’ll find a Wayfinder Token to unlock a Wayfinder of your choice, 1100 Runesilver, and 5 Reward Tower Keys waiting when you log in. For the rst of us, find out more about Wayfinder, or jump in with a Founder’s Pack via the official website now.
