Yesterday, we asked our readers whether they were gunning to play Throne and Liberty, and almost two-thirds of those who responded said they were at least going to wait a bit, either for the free-to-play launch or “to see how it all goes.” Well, consider this your first dose of “how it’s all going” because the headstart sure was a thing that happened.
As readers might have caught in our update, the launch went off the rails almost immediately as some Steam players with paid early access bundles weren’t actually being allowed through the gates (the studio characterized it as a problem on Steam’s end and said it was resolved). As Amazon is chronicling on the separate @TLGameStatus Twitter account, it also tackled a bug that was booting players out of the game when trying to log in and a bug on Xbox that wasn’t allowing gamers to join any multiplayer games (oops).
Around 4 a.m. EDT this morning, the team also pulled the servers down to shore up issues with Amitoi, lucent balance, localization, matchmaking, and screen flicker. The downtime was supposed to run six hours, but the servers are already back up.
But it’s been good news too: The crush of players has prompted Amazon to live the population cap on all servers in the NA East and EU Central regions and added multiple two new servers – Magna in the former and Ezekiel in the latter. SteamDB shows a peak of 53,884 people playing concurrently last night, a number that will surely blast upward as it pushes into the weekend – and then again once the free-to-play crowd joins up next week.
Worth noting is that everyone playing right now paid for access – and no, you can’t change your mind for a refund on Steam. If you’re on the fence, wait until the F2P launch.
