If you thought Guild Wars 2’s No Quarter was going to be the release champion of this big-launch MMO week, you deserve a whole pot of winnings because in this bizarre 2020, ArenaNet managed to put out functioning and high-quality content in the new living story episode, beloved by both players and our own critics.
Not all MMOs fared so well.
As we’ve been covering, The Elder Scrolls Online’s Greymoor struggled out of the gate on Tuesday, coming offline almost immediately for what players report was a bug that granted players who didn’t buy the chapter access to the content, while many players who did buy it were locked out. After being down most of the day – hitting EU players the hardest -, the game ultimately came back up and was playable Wednesday, though ZeniMax took the servers down again this morning in another attempt to fix access bugs for paying players.
Meanwhile, Phantasy Star Online 2 released on PC without much hoopla yesterday, though large swathes of the players couldn’t actually log in thanks to some serious client and Windows 10 access bugs. About half our own staff trying to play ran into the login issue itself, and the problems didn’t stop there. Here’s MOP’s Justin, commenting on his experience:
“For reasons that are probably not very good, SEGA made PSO2 only available through the much-loathed Windows Store rather than offering it through the PSO2 site or even Steam. People struggled to get the file, to jump through the many hoops of registering and logging in, and to get it working at all. For me, I spent several hours downloading it, only to find errors every time I tried to load the game. I had to uninstall it, update to the very latest version of Windows 10, reinstall it, and run it as an administrator before I could get to the launcher. Another issue was the fact that PSO2 starts in a much-reduced window mode, which a friend on Twitter told me could be resolved by changing the resolution, not in the game itself, but on the launcher. Sure. That’s intuitive. In any case, it was a hot mess that put a huge damper on what should have been a very exciting day for the MMORPG community, and I’m pointing all kinds of fingers at SEGA for poor communication and decision-making during this.”
If you’re looking for help from SEGA’s main Twitter account, you won’t see much there on the core feed; the company has replied to at least one complaint with a brief apology, however.
Hi there, we apologize for the negative experience you've had trying to download and set up #PSO2NA. We have been passing along all of your comments and error codes to the development team and they are aware of these issues. Thank you for your patience and have a great day.
— Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis – Global (@play_pso2) May 27, 2020
