Cyberpunk virtual reality MMORPG Zenith is shutting down servers, and if you believe studio Ramen VR, it’s not because of a drop in players but rather because it’s improved its back-end and therefore hopes to “better distribute players across shards.” For those not aware, Zenith doesn’t lock characters to servers or regions, so none of these servers will need merging; players will just log into a different one.
“When we first launched the game, we had players spread over dozens of servers, but we’ve heard a lot of feedback that bigger is not necessarily better,” the team writes. “A lot of players have picked a shard and found it pretty empty because everyone was on different shards at the time. Since the Celestial Throne dropped we’ve also been spending a lot of time behind the scenes working on our infrastructure. We now have shards that can handle more players for longer periods of time. As a result, we’re going to remove a number of shards on August 15, 2022 to improve player experience.”
We count 13 US and 3 European shards total on the closing list, with 24 staying up.
The game formally launched for VR platforms back in January and as of last month’s patch said it had seen new users and peak concurrency numbers double. Players are still awaiting the PC version promised during the game’s initial Kickstarter.
