Fans of games like Battle Chasers and Dark Siders were really excited last week when Wayfinders, a new action MMO from Airship Syndicate, launched into Early Access, allowing early adopters to get in on the action, kind of.
It turns out that the game launch faced a multitude of issues, unlike every other online launch over the past 15 years.
Players were stuck in waiting queues for hours only to be kicked from the game after being online for only a couple of minutes. Others were finding that the bonus content that they had purchased wasn’t available and that some in-game purchases were excessively expensive.
Not a great start for the game, especially considering the Early Access package was paid for, with some packages going for R2,229. Wayfinder is planning to be a free-to-play game when it officially launches next year.
Both the developers and publishing team, who are the very same team that delivered Warframe to over 30 million people worldwide, have issued an apology and have promised to address everything that has been brought up over the first weekend of Early Access.
“Yesterday sucked.” starts the apology. “It sucked for people who purchased Founder’s Packs and couldn’t play, and it sucked for us to see players unable to get into the game after believing in us and our vision.”
The team says that it was the overwhelming amount of players that caused their waiting system to crash and inevitably caused longer queue times. “Although we ran technical tests and betas across multiple regions, we were seeing more players every minute than played in our Beta each day.”.
While Early Access is generally used to be a system of feedback between the community and the developers, it could also be the hammer that crushes the whole game if it goes awry. As of writing this, over 9000 reviews on Steam have given the game a “Mostly Negative” rating.
If you think that the dev team can still pull their act together during Early Access, you can support them over on Steam by purchasing one of their Founders Edition bundles. Otherwise, it might not hurt to wait a little while and just jump on the free-to-play bandwagon next year.