World War II Online temporarily offline

Strategy First today released a statement concerning the recent launch of World War II Online, its massively multiplayer combat game. According to the company, initial game sales far exceeded expectations, with almost a third of the total projected sales reached on the first day of release. Although the game has clearly been successful from a sales standpoint, the actual game experience has been hampered by a large number of players being unable to register or play the game. Playnet's Cornered Rat Software, the developer of the game, has attributed the problems to a hardware problem with the game servers and is in the process of addressing it. The company expects to increase the server capacity in a matter of hours.

Cornered Rat also released a large patch for the game, which contains new terrain, vehicles, and weapons, according to Christina Ginger of Strategy First. When asked if the launch problems could have been avoided if the developer had conducted a larger open beta test, Ginger noted that the developer would have liked to have run a larger open beta but was unable to do so due to the development schedule. Ginger added that many massively multiplayer games go through growing pains at launch, and she expects the World War II Online server problems to be fixed shortly.

GameSpot also spoke with Jim Mesteller, the CEO of Playnet. Mesteller stated that the team thought they had everything properly planned out before launch, and that Playnet had been working with several partners on the project. The primary problem was that a group of brand-new switches had a compatibility issue with the operating system of the Playnet servers. The development team has been working on the problems all night long and plans to relaunch the servers at 6:00pm CT today, which should fix most of the switch compatibility issues. The one server that has been running can handle 600 players. Next, the team will continue to work to improve various elements of the game, including the frame rate.

Rodney Hodge of Playnet added that the team didn't expect such a large influx of registrations. According to Hodge, the company received approximately 20,000 registrations during the first six hours after the game launched. In order to handle the load, the team redirected all other Playnet.com Web resources to the registration task. Hodge also noted that he expects most pressing issues to be resolved by this evening or tomorrow morning.

Responding to questions about the game's beta test, he stated, "We tested everything to the best of our ability, but some things just don't rear their ugly heads until you actually do it for real."

About the patch, Hodge said that Cornered Rat has been working hard since the game shipped in order to optimize the game and add more vehicles and features for players, and that patching in online games is a common occurrence.

Strategy First has set up a forum on its official Web site that will post official news and updates on the progress of the situation from members of the development team. For more information about World War II Online, take a look at our previous coverage of the game. We'll post a full review of the game soon.