Lost Ark has been delayed due to “deployment issues.” This may be due to the game’s success during its early access period. The devs might be anticipating the servers going down with the blast of traffic the free-to-play launch will bring. The delay shouldn’t be excessive, but players should anticipate a few hours’ wait.
Why is Lost Ark’s release delayed?
Unfortunately, due to deployment issues, launch is delayed. We hope to have this resolved in a matter of hours.
Your patience is appreciated and we’ll update you soon.
— Lost Ark (@playlostark) February 11, 2022
Lost Ark has seen higher than anticipated hype, which likely has Amazon Games wanting to shore up its servers before launch. As we’ve seen with almost every major multiplayer game in the last 15 years, launch day is fraught with connection issues, servers going down, and general unpleasantness. Amazon Games is delaying Lost Ark to try and mitigate those problems as much as possible.
The devs haven’t gone into specifics on what “deployment issues” means. It could be that getting new servers up and running is taking longer than anticipated. Alternatively, Amazon Games could be taking the time to make sure traffic routing is ready for the load. Load balancing is crucial to make sure servers don’t get overloaded since it doesn’t matter how many servers you have if players aren’t getting routed to them.
Though Lost Ark is new to us, it’s actually a two-and-a-half-year-old game. It released in South Korea on December 4, 2019, and was successful enough there to pique Amazon Games’ interest. It’s an action RPG in the vein of Diablo, and fans of that genre are definitely looking for something to fill the void besides Path of Exile.
The game saw a peak of 532,476 players on Steam a few days ago, and that’s about to get even bigger when it officially launches. So it’s likely we’ll see some records being broken once the delay is over. We’ll be looking at the game in more detail in the coming days, so check back for more coverage.
