Rumors of the death of MMOs as a genre appear to be greatly exaggerated, as the once-obscure South Korean action RPG Lost Ark has seen amazing success after its launch last week. Developer Smilegate announced today that it's adding an entire new region of servers to Europe in order to deal with the avalanche of new players.
No timeline yet —
Though the new region is in the works, we don't know when exactly it'll come about — Smilegate said it's working "as quickly as possible" to get it done. Unfortunately, players who join these new servers will not be able to bring over their existing progress or characters, as this region is more an attempt to offload the new player load from existing servers than to lure existing players to a new one.
This isn't the first time that Smilegate has had to juggle increasing server load as Lost Ark has grown in popularity. Last week, the MMO offered to give exclusive items to early adapters again if they changed servers, as well as some premium currency. This move was intended to incentivize long-time players to switch to quieter servers in order to share the load, but it's not clear if it worked or not.
Breaking records already —
If you haven't heard of Lost Ark, you aren't alone, but it's already one of the biggest MMO launches ever. Last week, Lost Ark notched an all-time peak player count of 1,325,305, which is the second-highest concurrent player count in Steam history. Though that number is but a fraction of the 3.25 million that PUBG managed back in 2018, it's still pretty damn impressive.
Lost Ark is an action-RPG MMO that's often compared to the likes of Diablo. The blockbuster player counts have led to some connectivity issues for new players, but if you're interested, the game is free to play, so you’ve got nothing to lose but your own time.
