After becoming one of the most successful games ever released in China, Japan, and Korea, Lost Ark is finally arriving in the rest of the world. Fans of other action role-playing games such as Diablo 3 and Path of Exile have been anticipating the launch of Lost Ark, as it looks to promise similar combat and mechanics.With Lost Ark topping 500,000 players on Steam before the game's full launch, it is fair to say that anticipation is extremely high for the game. As such, many players have been counting the days before its launch. With a hotfix having been scheduled for 5 AM Pacific time on launch day, it was assumed by many that the game would be released after the hotfix was finished.However, today is launch day, and it is long past the assumed launch time for the game. According to Lost Ark's Twitter account, the reason for the delay is due to deployment issues, and that fixing the issues could take hours. For many players who have had the game preloaded since Lost Ark's pre-load times were revealed and were hoping to quickly jump in, the hype has unfortunately been halted.
After server and load time issues that prompted Lost Ark to offer items for server changes, players were hoping the game would at least experience a clean launch. However, between the hotfix announced previously and now deployment issues, the launch has been delayed for many hours past its intended release. Commenters were quick to point out that this delay marks the second time an Amazon game has experienced launch issues, the first being with controversial game New World, with many others bashing both the game and Amazon for the delays.
However, if the Steam numbers are anything to go by, there is a strong possibility that Amazon has delayed the launch due to the likely massive number of players waiting to jump in. For most games, launch day is the most taxing on a game's servers due to the sheer amount of traffic caused by so many players logging in at the same time. Thus, there is a possibility that Amazon was afraid that there would be queues and crashes occurring all over the place and decided that the best option would be to further prepare the game for the coming storm of players.
With issues such as long queue times as well as Amazon's localization of Lost Ark, a poor launch does not bode well for the game. However, considering how well Lost Ark has done in its first three years of existence in other countries, this delay should become a bump in the road rather than a foreshadowing of the game's future. Regardless, Amazon is most likely scrambling to launch the game while players sit and wait (patiently or impatiently) for the highly anticipated title.
Lost Ark releases for PC on February 11.
