Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem recently launched on Steam after several years of Early Access. The ARPG has been compared to both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile, iterating on design and gameplay that ARPG fans want more of. It's hardly surprising then that Wolcen has proven an incredible success. For comparison, Wolcen garnered more concurrent players than Resident Evil 2 Remake at launch. Sadly, but not necessarily unsurprisingly, Wolcen was completely unprepared for the wave of new players at launch.
Just hours after Wolcen's launch, the Wolcen development team began reporting a variety of server issues. While Wolcen's dev team was very transparent and communicative about what was happening, no solution was immediately available. Eventually, the Wolcen team confirmed that online servers would need to be taken down for maintenance so that they could be upgraded. That was a full day ago, with the game having launched only two days ago.
The most recent tweet on the official Wolcen Twitter account confirmed the lengthy extension of server maintenance. "We continue our efforts day and night with our partner to bring back Online servers," the account clarifies. It also provides a time of 12 pm UTC Sunday for the earliest servers might come back up. That, unfortunately, does leave room for further delays if necessary.
One thing that needs to be made abundantly clear is that the state of Wolcen prior to the maintenance was unsustainable. The servers were frequently disconnecting if players were able to connect to them at all. The Wolcen team appears to be doing everything it can to remedy the situation, however, server issues genuinely depend on partner services and are completely out of developer control.
Regardless of the problem and regardless of any empathy players might have for Wolcen's development team, this isn't a good place to be. Two of Wolcen's first three days of full release are going to have online servers completely down, while the other day had struggling, buggy servers. Players are paying as much as $40 for a game where a core feature isn't available. This situation may have been unavoidable, but it still sucks.
For the time being, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem players aren't entirely removed from the game. Wolcen has an offline mode that, by all accounts, appears to be working well enough. The game still has 50,000 viewers on Twitch and that's not even the highest its been in the past day. It's true that its numbers appear to be shrinking due to the server issues, but once those servers are going again the popularity may return.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is available now on PC.