As many games past, present, and surely future, have experienced, the new action RPG Last Epoch is having a bit of an interesting launch, with a frustrating “hug of death” slowing login and load times.
And with numbers now shared, it’s no shocker that there are issues—director Judd Cobler went onto the game’s subreddit to explain with an announcement, explaining that within 20 minutes of launch, 150,000 people attempted to access the game.
“This did mean that all of our scale testing efforts were immediately put to the test, and unfortunately a service failed in a way that we didn’t suspect, and we immediately went to work to investigate and resolve it,” he explained. Thankfully, there’s also an offline mode that some players were able to flip into as well. Cobler and other developers also stayed transparent by posting in the official Discord throughout the launch with updates, and he promises they’ll continue to do so in the future.
As a thank-you (and likely an apology as well) to those who were attempting to access the game, the team announced that all players who’ve joined since launch will be getting a free cosmetic, which will be gifted automatically.
Last Epoch getting such a massive wave of players is still likely a rough compliment in a period with several major launches for multiplayer games, including Helldivers 2, which has gotten so big that it implemented an AFK lockout timer to ensure its queue moves along.
