If you’re all-in for ArcheAge Unchained with a preorder already made, you’ve probably been anxious to know when exactly you can take advantage of its various perks – no, you won’t be logging in early, but you will have access to character reservation and predownloading. The short version here is that character reservation isn’t opening today; it’s opening this weekend.
“We originally communicated that Character Reservation was targeted to occur simultaneously with the release of the Unchained Public Test Server (PTS) on October 1st, 2019,” Gamigo says. “This was sub-optimal for several reasons: We needed to adequately communicate the Character Reservation Time with enough grace period to pre-download the client.” Additionally, the team didn’t really want to open things up on a weekday or make folks choose between the PTS and name reservations. So instead, name reservations will open up on Saturday, October 5th, at 1 p.m. EDT for North Americans and 10 a.m. UTC for Europeans.
As for the PTS itself, Gamigo says it’ll be testing hardware configs for the Shadows Revealed patch and Unchained, plus queueing, character creation and progression data, and the overhauled main storyline: “After this initial testing phase concludes, we’ll move forward with a focus on iterating against game play systems, the marketplace, fixing feature and localization errors, and most importantly actioning community feedback.”
“The Unchained Public Test server will continue along schedule, opening for founders tomorrow, October 1st, 2019 at 10:00 AM PDT. PTS uses the same server as the Media Preview that occurred this past weekend and character data will not be wiped. The first 2-3 days of testing will focus around load balancing with an active population cap in place, but the server will be available for constant play. Later during the week, the population cap will be increased allowing for the same atmosphere as a live server.”
