We can’t say that the launch of Guild Wars 2’s Secrets of the Obscure release went off without a hitch, but it was relatively smooth, all things considered, thanks to the game’s tech that ensures there isn’t even a downtime period.
At launch yesterday, there were two immediate issues, however: Some folks trying to buy the expansion were getting irritating error 108 timeouts, and the Wizard’s Vault was a nonfunctional string of code. ArenaNet addressed the most glaring bugs, but it’s also maintaining a list of smaller issues you might want to skim through. Some of the bugs are even leading to… let’s call it emergent gameplay, like players deciding to queue up politely to talk to an NPC one by one so folks weren’t endlessly locked out of MQ advancement.
When not recounting bugs, the community right now is busying itself debating the merits of the new daily system, which is not only locking people into their category choices on a weekly basis but also not offering the variety of options for content that many players were hoping for.
Guild Wars 2 is 11 years old, and its Steam launch was fairly recent, so obviously we can’t use Steam as a measure of the game’s overall population, but it’s worth noting that the Steam playerbase peak more than doubled yesterday and Steam reviews post-expansion are in the “very positive” zone.
And finally, on the topic of the 11th anniversary, some players are already getting their character birthday gifts and warning gamers that the new gifts are now static with no novel items added this year – and they no longer come with titles ticking past the 10th birthday.
