Mordhau devs fix progression, apologise for ongoing server wonkiness

All has not been well with war. From the few hours I've played so far, Mordhau might be one of the best multiplayer sword 'em ups since Chivalry - but its Monday release went about as smoothly as a charge under hot pitch. Developers Triternion have apologised for the problems, fixed some issues that stopped XP and gold rewards from being distributed, and made it so you can actually unlock stuff in the Armory now. They also say they're "looking into ways to compensate players for their troubles".

The near non-functioning matchmaking queue remains bothersome, and both official and custom servers seem prone to intermittent stuttering.

Triternion's apology comes via Reddit, where they blame unexpected popularity. "First and foremost an apology to all players from our entire team. The current state of the game is not the one we wanted you to experience at launch. It might sound cliché, but we were not able to keep up with the rapidly growing playerbase in this short amount of time."

I've spent roughly fifteen minutes in the official matchmaking queue, spread out over the past few days. In that time I've managed to join a server once. It was a 64-player battle royale server with only one other swordboy. That's a shame, because I'm quietly quite excited about a melee-only murder royale. Mordhau's combat is some of the tensest and tactical-iest I've yet seen, with a flashy new parrying system and unprecedentedly satisfying slicey sounds. But that tension tends to get lost in the chaos of big team brawls, where finesse takes a back seat to opportunistic attacks on unaware or outnumbered enemies.

The server browser mostly works fine, and I'm glad to see plenty of deathmatch games hosted with "duel only" in their name. The devs do also mention that their "top priority right now is to iron out the stability problems with our official servers, as well as bugs with the matchmaker."

I'll let you know how I get on when my Mordhau review goes up early next week.