After its initial two-week delay, the sandbox MMORPG Hegemony went live this weekend, though not without issues such as instance crashing and database overloading, and while the devs fought to battle against the problems, one was ultimately deemed too challenging to do while the game was live, and so there will be another delay.
The issue is the saving of objectives, which are explained as task containers that award players with quest states when they complete tasks. While testing saw the system that saved objectives work with 200 people, the game’s launch saw 2,000, which overloaded the database. As a result, the devs have elected to shut Hegemony down once again and delay launch until Saturday, March 28th. Items, bank inventories, and skills will not be reset, though quests and ranks will be as a result of the fix.
So what’s next for the game? According to an earlier forum post, players can expect additional servers as needed, the ability to claim land after two weeks in order for new players to acquire the relevant social ranks needed to join in, additional quests and rank-up quests, and continued bug squashing.
As for how updates will work, the lead dev Hegemon promises that servers are restarted one at a time and players are moved to updated servers, which should allow the team to deploy updates and bug fixes without interrupting the player experience. Speaking of networking and servers, there was also a recent dev blog that outlined how Hegemony has built its network around the limitations of Minecraft, which should be an interesting read for the armchair developer.
If this is your first time hearing about Hegemony, it’s a “classic” sandbox MMORPG built on the bones of Minecraft. As mentioned earlier, it was due to arrive in the middle of February but had to delay its launch since two of its three-member team fell ill.
