WORLD WAR 2 CONTINUES INTO SECOND DAY, SOME COMBATANTS ACTUALLY FIND ONE ANOTHER [Author: Lum the Mad]
World War 2 Online continued onward, with publishers Strategy First and developers Cornered Rat Software busily spinning the game press on how being totally unprepared for your game’s launch is actually quite normal.
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.
Especially redownloading the entire game the first day. Quite normal. Happens all the time. Yup.
Voodoo Extreme actually asked someone at Cornered Rat about our little performance art with WW2 Offline last night.
Hodge also commented on an IRC log that the Lum The Mad web site posted up which showed “Lum” having problems playing the game offline. “He didn’t bother to read the .readme files or the manual,” Hodge said of Lum’s experiences, “I don’t know about you but I have never played a game like that.”
For the record, not only did I read the manual (which wasn’t a difficult chore, since only 4 pages or so actually detailed how to drive vehicles) but the chat log actually shows me reading from the manual while trying to launch my STUKA TAXI. Then again, given the stellar QA testing WW2OL betrays, CRS’ unfamiliarity with attention to detail is understandable.
We’ll have a full review of WW2OL up in a few minutes (and no, not by me, so you partisans can put down your pitchforks and torches). Until then, we’ve been getting word that the game is actually fun on the rare occasions that it works.