Sega to fix, split Phantasy Star Universe

By Walt Wyman, GameSpotPosted Sep 13, 2006 3:37 pm PT

After a Japanese launch mired in difficulties, publisher says it is making "drastic improvements," adding second "world" of servers.

Since Phantasy Star Universe launched in Japan for the PlayStation 2 and PC last month, the game's online experience has been plagued by unstable connections and problems related to character data. Phantasy Star Universe publisher Sega has addressed the issues on the game's Web site, saying that it is making "drastic improvements" to the game, which was the top-selling title in Japan last week despite its problems. The announcement further says that Sega is working to "bring the debugging period to a close."

The largest change announced was that new game servers are being added. Until now, PSU has been contained within the World 1 servers, but from September 14, a second set of servers, dubbed World 2, will be put online. Worlds 1 and 2 will be totally independent of each other, so players will be required to select a world when logging on. Character data cannot be moved between the worlds, but players will be allowed to keep up to four characters on each world using a single account.

Sega also listed a number of bug fixes that have already been made, such as fixing the overwriting, the rollback, and the locking-up of character data. However, issues with logging in and transporting to the My Room areas have not yet been resolved.

"The bugs that have occurred so far have been caused by the concentration of access traffic, which surpassed our estimates and resulted in overflows on the database server," the publisher explained. "This was causing character data to be overwritten and rolled back, and these issues spread to the My Room servers. We have been working around these problems on the program level, and by adding servers, but everyday access traffic exceeded our maintenance efforts."

44 Comments

  • menciawatcher25

    Posted Apr 19, 2007 5:50 pm PT

    since on the xbox you have to pay for xbox live maybe they should make the monthly fee go away i mean xbox live is hard enough to pay for

  • over_18

    Posted Sep 16, 2006 11:21 am PT

    least we wont have to go thru that crap........hopefully that is

  • Dualmask

    Posted Sep 15, 2006 10:30 am PT

    I wonder if the offline play will be decent...or even existent. Color me weird, but my friends and I have a lot of fun playing PSO on GameCube offline. Sure, there's probably a much deeper experience online (so I hear) but the game is fun anyway.

  • Omatic810

    Posted Sep 15, 2006 12:35 am PT

    I wish they'd make this free per month, but it seems that it's not the case. I've loved the PSO series since the first Dreamcast version, but I'm not sure I can tolerate much more screw ups from them. The bar is now higher for MMO's, and if they're gonna charge, they'd BETTER make it worth our while. Otherwise, it'll flare out quickly as American gamers return to the more successful MMO's such as Guild Wars (free to play + excellent PVP), WoW, etc.

    I truly hope Sega can pull this off in the Americas. Sega is a good company when they get into it, so maybe they can.

  • yoshigt

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 10:07 pm PT

    come on people. almost every mmorpgs has problem when it first come out. WoW had this kind of problem when it first came out. i am sure that sega will fix the problem pretty soon. Even WoW and FFXI sometimes have problem to log in nowaday. just give this game a chance. i am sure that psu is going to be a good online rpg game. i have played the japanese version. it is very good. i am looking forward to play this game. =)

  • Alpha2

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 9:01 pm PT

    Okay even PSO had moe servers than this. They must be retarded if they expect people to pay for THIS kind of service on day one when it launches here.

  • _Sam_

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 5:41 pm PT

    hopefully they get everything working

  • Statictrance

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 3:37 pm PT

    icekxg - isn't it sad? I have to agree sega has gone downhill... I've supported them for years and years, but anymore, when a new sega game comes out, i usually don't even notice. It really saddens me. I'll be buying this game day one, cause Phantasy Star has been my stuff since age 8, but it's pretty much my last chance with this company...

  • V-Nine

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 1:49 pm PT

    How could Sega doubt themselves this much. They didnt think it would get this popular this soon. On another note, don't they know if people put accounts on both servers it will still be overwhelmed. Get uber bigger, scaleable servers. Imagine when US and EU servers get on. I dont wanna be stuck offline all the time as well as lose all that hard earned progress uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuug! Well back to Ep. 1,2&3.

  • Mercutio89

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 11:48 am PT

    Sega, dont let me down!

  • macross

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 9:06 am PT

    I heard a lot of good stuff about this game before its release so I'll wait until I actually play the game before I make any conclusions. Besides, they're having problems because of overwelming traffic. That's means that people are actually enjoying the game no?
    AND it's a lie that SEGA never updates PSO. They were constantly releasing new missions and events.

  • glhx1rush

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 8:18 am PT

    Yep, not going to pay to play this game, If I did , I would get PC version. Guild Wars has set the standard for me, concerning online games that are free to play. I played (and payed) EQ for over 4 yrs, so i'm through with paying to play for awhile...... I would like to see some console games like GW, free to play online, and bring out an expansion once a year, and still have "events" every few months, to keep things interresting on the game... It is possible to do that without milking $14.95 per player, per month......... Not going to happen though, because it is all about the money.

  • SilV3RSix

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 7:35 am PT

    Riverwolf007
    "To all the people crying about a monthly fee on games of this type let me tell you its actually cheaper to play mmorpgs. "

    Of course its cheaper if you only buy one game and play it 4 months as opposed to buying a new game each month. Duh. But who wants to spend four months of their life playing ONE game? Say you like WoW. Thats TWO monthly subscription fees unless you decide you won't play both games at the same time. The point is monthly fees for individual games inherently narrows the gamers choice of time allocation.

  • Icekxg

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 6:22 am PT

    ok, listen people, I LOVE the phantasy star series, I even loved PSO back when it released on the dreamcast, and let me tell you, I've played the japanese version of PSU and all I can tell you is that SEGA sux anymore! They spent how much time working on this game and in the end it just seems like a "different" version of PSO, different as in not better and not worse. I have been losing faith in Sega and now I think it has hit rock bottom. They just don't put their heart and soul into their games like they used too, but maybe that's just the Sammy side of them.

    I know other people have already said this and I'll just reinstate it...the way the online gameplay operates is no different than Guild Wars or Diablo, so why make us pay for a service Sega??? And to those people who think that it takes money to maintain the servers, I would agree with you if they were constantly updated with new content which Sega never does, if you don't believe me, just go and play Blue Burst.

    I was really anticipating this game, but Sega, you just ruin everything you touch anymore.

  • azad_champ

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 6:17 am PT

    OPOLO Yes, it will

  • OPOLO

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 5:51 am PT

    Is this the game coming to the 360?

  • sonitus_aus

    Posted Sep 14, 2006 3:18 am PT

    good to see there on it, so hard to find all the bugs in code, especially code as complex as server and networking

  • ysdarkfact

    Posted Sep 13, 2006 10:02 pm PT

    This is hardly a MMO. Guild Wars is more of a MMO than this, and GW is free.

  • amtalx

    Posted Sep 13, 2006 9:51 pm PT

    its not a simple as just "having enough servers." judging initial demand is difficult and is really just a guessing game. blizzard went through the process of having a closed beta stress test to make sure the diablo 2 servers didnt fail. what happned? servers were down within hours of release and a patch was out the next day. im not trying to excuse segas lack of preparation but its not as easy as it sounds.

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