ArcheAge: Unchained Servers Have Heavy Load During Launch Yesterday As Steam Release Is Delayed

Yesterday the floodgates opened for gamigo's ArcheAge: Unchained, giving eager veterans and newcomers a chance to check out the latest version of the MMORPG. However, like all opening days in the MMO world, things did not go as smoothly as they could have.

As the game opened up in the EU, servers were packed and queues through the roof, with some wait times being greater than an hour. The scene was much the same when the NA servers opened up, with Wynn being the most populated server by far. Players encountered issues getting into the server, especially as a bug affected the log-in server in the early hours after NA launch, causing players to not even be able to join the queue.

As a result, the team behind ArcheAge: Unchained spun up another NA server and EU server - Kaylin and Tinnereph repectively - to help alleviate the population issues. Additionally, character creation on the more populated NA servers had to be suspended, Wynn and Tyrenos, to help monitor the population. 

Meanwhile the EU servers were brought offline to fix an issue with Patron and item delivery issues that players were reporting on those servers. The same character restrictions placed on the NA servers were also extended to the EU-Alexander server - one of the more populated servers early according to the dev livestream which occurred during the NA launch hours.

The ArcheAge team has been diligent with updating players throughout the day and evening, both on Twitter and the official Discord channel. To their credit, every single time something was hindering the launch experience, the team was quick to inform players so they could be kept aware of the situation and plan accordingly.

Finally - the awaited Steam release has unfortunately been delayed a few days as the team works to resolve issues with the client. Originally hoping to have the Steam client ready by today, the team has just added an update stating that it won't be spun up until tomorrow at the earliest.

The teams at gamigo and XLGames worked through the evening to address the issues with the Steam version of ArcheAge: Unchained. While significant progress was made to resolve the item delivery issues, we continue to experience problems with enabling the Steam Wallet, a mandatory requirement to release the product on Steam. The main challenge here was that additional client builds are required to resolve the issue and our build/transfer times are considerable. We attempted to provide fixes that didn’t require a new client version but ultimately, they were not successful. We feel strongly about releasing on Steam free of these issues and very regretfully must delay further. As a result, we’re re-targeting official release for Thursday, 17th Oct at 11:00am PDT.

As of this morning some servers still have restrictions placed on character creation, specifically on the more populated servers. It'll be interesting to see how ArcheAge: Unchained handles the load today as more players try their hand at the revamped MMORPG. Our reviewer, Emily, is hard at work fighting the queues and will be providing her first impressions of the launched Unchained as we move through the week.