Survival MMO Last Oasis Turns Out To Be Too Early For Early Access

Just days after launching on Steam, the massively multiplayer online game Last Oasis has already gone offline following widespread reports from players about issues trying to log on and server crashes.

“We are suspending Last Oasis servers for the next seven days,” said Donkey Crew, the studio behind the game, on Twitter yesterday. “Our coders have been working day and night on this issue and need some sleep. We need to properly investigate why our load testing didn’t pick this issue up, find out why, figure it out properly and solve it.” In the meantime, Donkey Crew said players who bought the game, which came out in Early Access on March 26, will get full refunds no matter how much time they’ve already logged in it. For most players, that probably wasn’t much time.

https://kotaku.com/last-oasis-is-the-most-pc-game-imaginable-1831997599

Last Oasis takes place in a world where a cataclysmic event stopped the Earth’s rotation, throwing one half of it into a new deep freeze and the other into a scorching hellscape as it gets continually baked by the sun. As a result, humanity has taken refuge in the band of temperate climate between where the two halves meet, with these remaining people now traveling around in giant wooden mech bases. A lot of players have said they struggled to ever see any of this, hounded instead by crashed servers and login wait times.

These players took to the game’s forums and subreddit to post about being greeted by a countdown timer when trying to get into the game, only to have it result in a “request failed” screen when it was finished. Others who managed to play were beleaguered by crashes and then forced to re-queue. “Best ‘Signing you in’ Simulator of 2020,” wrote one Steam user

The game’s reviews section is also a mess, split between thousands of people angry about the game’s launch issues and about not being able to play over the weekend, with almost as many arguing that people should give the developers a break since it’s an Early Access release.

Even many of the thousands of negative reviews say the underlying game shows promise, however. One of those rays of light is the game’s walkers: giant mechs made out of wood that dozens of players can ride on together to go raiding. Hopefully the game’s re-launch next Sunday goes more smoothly.

Donkey Crew did not immediately respond to a request for comment.