I haven’t had the chance to try any new mobile MMOs lately because a game I’ve been looking forward to for some time finally launched – Tree of Savior. I’ve been looking forward to Tree of Savior ever since Gravity Interactive / Warportal disappointed me with the lackluster release of Ragnarok Online 2. In fact, now that I look back at Warportal, the company doesn’t have a SINGLE good game besides the original Ragnarok. Rose Online is generic and offers zero innovation. I don’t think the game offered any innovation the day it came out, which makes me wonder how it survived this long without being shut down. I suspect Gravity will shut down their older games sooner or later as games like Rose Online and Requiem don’t have the playerbases to support them. At least that’s my speculation.
But anyway, now that Tree of Savior launched into early access, I think my MMO thirst will be quenched for some time. The game is free to play, but a $9.99 early access pack has to be purchased to access the game before its official April 30 launch date, which gives early access users a 1 month head start. After buying my early access pack and logging on, I was surprised to see how many others were on Tree of Savior. Steamcharts reported 34,581 peak concurrent users in the last 24 hours, which puts Tree of Savior on the top 10 list of most popular games on Steam, ahead of of other MMORPGs like Knight Online, Tera, and Path of Exile. Keep in mind, this is BEFORE the free to play launch too. Everyone online now paid for an early access bundle! I suspect the free to play launch next month will bring in even more users, pushing the game to over 50K concurrent, which would make it easily the most popular MMO on Steam.
Despite the game’s huge early success, the game has been largely unplayable for me since early access began. The first day was plagued with incredibly long queues (2+ hours long) and even after getting in, the game was unbearably laggy. Even today the game is pretty laggy. The queues are gone, but latency issues persist, which degrades the experience. After seeing the disasterous Tree of Savior launch, I’m very much impressed with how smooth the Black Desert Online launch has been. Black Desert sold over 500K preorders before launch and the servers were remarkably stable throughout the head start program and even into launch! I find it interesting that so many traditional desktop MMORPGs suffer from terrible launch issues, but so many mobile games seem to handle it much better. I remember when Eternity Warriors 4 game out (from Glu Mobile). I downloaded it and played it on launch day without any issues. Same thing for Million Arthur (but this one’s a card game, not an MMO). Heroes Wanted launched on March 10, 2016 without any issues either. It must be something with the network infrastructure of desktop vs mobile games, as mobile game launches seem to be much smoother for whatever reason.
Despite the unbearably latency issues, I’ve gotten myself to level 25 on Tree of Savior so far. I’m hoping the lag dies down in the coming days so I can get a proper grind session in without disconnects and long loading times.