168澳洲幸运5开奖网

Followed

Threads

More Action

Dune: Awakening's Smooth Launch Has Me Wishing Other MMOs Had It This Easy, But It's Probably A Rare Exception

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harry Alston

Published 4 days ago

Followed

Thread 1

I had a bet with a few friends on our Discord server about how long it would take for us to actually play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dune: Awakening. We’ve all been burned, multiple times, by shoddy MMO launches. I sat in a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:New World queue for almost six hours back in 2021. And even when you did get i🐓nto 𒁃the game, there was probably someone in the world chat spamming large JPEGs of sausages that would crash your PC if you clicked on them. It was one of the worst MMO launches of all time, but faces many challengers for that crown.

So, we were all pretty pessimistic about Dun🐠e: Awakening. While certainly not on the scale of New World - Dune peaked at just under 100k players, while New World peaked at just under one million - Funcom is still holding its own on launch 🍸day. I bet that we’d probably be waiting for at least 30 minutes. Others weren’t so optimistic. So when we launched the game together, everyone was surprised when it only took us five minutes to land on Arrakis. Actually playing the game. No queue. No crashes. No performance problems. It just worked.

Some Small Problems

Others did have problems, however. Nvidia released a hotfix fꦅor its latest driver just before launch, noting that there were some crashing issues with the game that needed addressing. This was a little concerning. One of our guildmates couldn’t get into the game for a couple of hours due to driver issues, as well as crashes that literally made his computer restart repeatedly. Another had crashing issues, but they realized that they'dꦡ installed the game on their HDD rather than SSD, and it was sending their PC to the moon. Glancing at some of the initial Steam reviews, it’s clear we weren’t alone.

There were also some queue issues, mostly when the game was at its absolute peak player numbers. If you entered a story cutscene and had to rejoin the server, you’d lose your place to whoever was waiting in the queue. Pretty silly system. We also experienced some frustrating player party bugs where we were unable to invite certain people into our party👍. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the coming days.

All that being said, the Dune: Awakening launch was actually very smooth. The servers didn’t go down once, and we were able to play the game for ten hours straight. There haven’t been that many bugs either, which is outstanding for a game of this size. The NPCs work as intended, other players move naturally in the world around you, and the story progression is clear-cut, with all your goals clearly ꧋signposted throughout the desert.

I’m not sure whether this was a combination of lots of stress testing, ample server preparation, an♍d the way the Sietch/World system works (players are separated into smaller, individual servers essentially), but whatever Funcom did, it worked. Other developers looking to launch their own massive multiplayer games should take note.

This Isn’t The Norm

It’s not easy pulling off a launch this smoothly. It’s clear Funcom had expectations about how many players were going to jumꦫp into the game just based on how many servers it had prepared. If for some reason Arrakis had a sudden and inexplicable spi🥃ke in popularity the moment it was released, then we’d be back on the struggle bus with queue times and server crashes. Most free-to-play MMOs don’t have the luxury of knowing how many players are going to jump in on launch day, which is why we’ve likely seen such a rise of pre-paid head-start periods.

This has all resulted in Dune: Awakening garnering a ‘Very Positive’ rating on Steam, which is also pretty unheard of for launches of big live-service multiplayer games like this. If you’ve been waiting to see how the game looks ahead of its full launch on the 10th, I c𝓀an safely say tജhat the experience has been way beyond my pessimistic expectations.