Game developer Funcom has officially given early access to its prehistoric and barbaric survival video game “Conan Exiles” on January 31 for both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One gamers.
So far, much of the negative reaction to the game stems from its online multiplayer mode that has been running into serious online lag.
Funcom simply cannot afford to get all the negative reactions on the online multiplayer mode of the game that it has decided to temporarily shut down the official easy access servers of “Conan Exiles” last week while they switch to a new host, reports Rock Paper and Shotgun.
The majority of servers for the early access survival sandbox game are unofficial player-run ones, especially for those who have good little war child in them who sticks to the playground and never jumps the fence to play in the woods.
The switch is part of Funcom’s battle against online lag, which was basically one of the major complaints of gamers and critics after they played the game via its early access.
Funcom has also released a flurry of patches aimed at tackling lag in other ways.
Ending the partnership with servers
In an official statement, Funcom explained that due to the overwhelming demand for servers and their needs for administrating them, their official partner has been unable to deliver the level of quality and service that they require.
It added that because of such, they have mutually agreed to end the partnership. Funcom said that they are in the process of finding new partners with the ideal hardware that they can move the existing game databases to.
So the 200 official servers are going away for a bit. Funcom says they’ve saved the databases so gamers who played on them should keep their progress. After all, there are plenty of servers around to serve the gaming community.
Accordingly, there are officially 9,451 online servers that are active currently so getting rid of the 200 is no big deal nor a challenge for Funcom as it can easily get a replacement even twice the number if it wants to.
Servers requiring Server Admins
Since last week, Funcom has also released quite a few patches tackling lag, rubberbanding, crashes, and more.
Funcom further explained that in their rush to get fixes out to the gamers, they never really stopped to think about the fact that for “Conan Exiles,” they have thousands of unofficial servers that actually require their Server Admins to get them updated. The developer also admitted that it is their fault.
It went on to elaborate that while urgently critical fixes will still go out as soon as possible, they will try to be better about the timing of less critical patches going forward.
It likely means that Funcom will be patching when more gamers are online, and they know that no matter when they patch, it will be at a bad time for someone, which is why it resorted to temporarily shutting down the servers instead.
Also upon the release of early access, “Conan Exiles” has also become the subject of system crashes. It was likewise accidentally removing Denuvo in a patch which resulted in the game being cracked in a day. Of course, the lag issues for its multiplayer mode were there right from the beginning, notes PC Games N.
For those who really want to get a serving of “Conan Exiles,” they can still play either through one of the several unofficial servers or in an offline single player.
Funcom has reassured players that they have copies of all server databases, which means progress will be restored once they find a new server host.
The game developer also took the time to apologize for not informing those running unofficial servers about the avalanche of patches that have come since the game’s launch.