Wayfinder's developers apologise for rough launch as it receives 'mostly negative' reviews on Steam
Server issues amid monetisation woes
Wayfinder will be free-to-play when it reaches 1.0, but it costs money if you want to get involved with the early access version which launched earlier this week. That didn't dissuade players, it seems. Its launch was popular enough for its servers to fall over, leaving players unable to login, a fact for which its developers have now apologised.
"Yesterday sucked. There is no other way to say it. 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," begins the apology post.
"Although we ran technical tests and betas across multiple regions, we were seeing more players every minute than played in our Beta each day," it continues. "Although we had a queue system ready, that system failed immediately." Fixes were apparently implemented quickly, but Airship Syndicate say they had to cap the number of players that could connect to the server.
The statement also includes comment from Wayfinder's publisher Digital Extremes, who as the creators of Warframe are no strangers to running popular multiplayer games. "We apologize," they wrote. "We know players have high expectations of [Digital Extremes]’s infrastructure to deliver in moments like this, and in this instance we, as the publisher, fell short."
At the time of writing, Wayfinders has a "Mostly Negative" rating on Steam after over 7000 reviews, and there's also an acknowledgement in the statement that some criticism relates to monetisation and a failure founders' rewards to some players. Airship Syndicate are going to make changes to the former, fix the latter, and are "currently working on our plans for compensating those purchased into Early Access whether they got into the game or not."
Wayfinders is a fantasy action-RPG with a dash of Destiny. Ed played it during its closed beta, and found its combat weighty, its world stunning, but that it offered nothing new for those who have already done their time in the live servie mines.