The MMO action RPG had a pre-sale and early access launch that attracted over half a million players in a day. Lost Ark is already Steam’s second most-played game of all time, and just before it launched on Friday immediately ran into problems. Despite the hiccups, that hasn’t slowed down the constant influx of people wanting to get into the free-to-play game. Over the weekend the highest concurrent peak registered a stunning 1.32 million players making their way across Arkesia.
According to a statement released on the Lost Ark website, because of the game’s architecture, Smilegate simply can’t just add more servers, but instead, needs to set up an entirely new region of servers. The exact number wasn’t included in the post, but existing regions range anywhere from seven to 19 servers, so expect the same for this new one.
This will be an entirely new region, completely separate from Central Europe, and thus will be without cross-region play availability. So, a player’s Royal Crystal and Silver balances from the Central Europe region won’t be accessible in the new one. The new region is being designed as a home for players who either haven’t created a character yet or haven’t committed to staying on an existing server. Players who want to restart in this new region will definitely want to wait on claiming any “per Account” items, like the additional Founder’s Pack Redemption.
While this should help server bottlenecks, players should expect to see Lost Ark’s lengthy queue times continue until everything is set up properly, which could take some time even though the two companies are feverishly working together to get the new region online.
These gifts will be made available once the new region is up and running and any player entering the new European servers will be able to get them through March 1st. The exact launch window for the new server region will come via an update as soon as the companies are ready to release that information.
Lost Ark is available now on PC.
Source: Lost Ark blog
