Lost Ark Free-To-Play Launch Delayed Following Deployment Issues

Lost Ark's official free-to-play launch has been delayed, though it sounds like it might be a matter of hours rather than days.

Servers were supposed to go live for the MMORPG February 11 at 9 AM PST/ 12 PM EST. That is no longer the case. The news came via an announcement from the official Lost Ark Twitter account, stating that due to deployment issues, the launch has been delayed. "We hope to have this resolved in a matter of hours," the tweet reads.

It looks like publisher Amazon and developer Smilegate RPG are looking to avoid a repeat of Lost Ark's head start launch on Steam from earlier in the week. The head start launch, which was only available for players who purchased one of Lost Ark's Founder's Packs, saw similar deployment issues, resulting in many players being unable to download the game for the first few hours following its official launch.

Players who finally did manage to download the game then found themselves in log in queues for busy servers, as the game peaked at over 500,000 concurrent players shortly after launch. Many of the game's initial server offerings are now full and don't allow for character creation by new players. For the free-to-play launch, Amazon and Smilegate RPG have created 15 new servers and are trying to encourage players to move to lower population servers by allowing players who have already redeemed their Founder's Pack rewards on one server to do so again on a new server.

In addition to massive concurrent player counts for the game's head start launch, Lost Ark has also seen huge numbers of viewers on Twitch (which is owned by Lost Ark's publisher Amazon). The game saw more than 1.3 million viewers watching Lost Ark related streams during the game's head start launch. Watching certain streams for the game grants players in-game rewards in the form of Twitch Drops as part of the Legends of Lost Ark launch event.