Developer of Medieval multiplayer melee slasher Mordhau apologises after unexpectedly strong launch hobbles servers
Currently Steam's 11th most popular game.
Mordhau is a medieval multiplayer slasher built around first-person hand-to-hand combat. It's daft, gory, and has rocketed up Steam's concurrent player chart since launching on April 29th. Unfortunately, its sudden success has caught developer Triternion off-guard, with wonky server performance rather spoiling the fun of lopping someone's head off with a well-swung sword.
It's not particularly hard to see why a game of chaotic battlefield mayhem, in which everyone runs around with wild abandon armed with a variety of pointy, stabby things, might capture people's imagination enough to turn it into Steam's 11th most popular title at the time of writing - especially given its sharp visuals, in-depth character customisation, and surprisingly nuanced melee combat. And players are having great fun sharing memories of flying limbs and entrails from the likes of Mordhau's 64-player team death match and battle royale modes.
Unfortunately, all that attention hasn't been too kind to Mordhau's servers, and developer Triternion has now apologised for the game's less-than-satisfactory online performance. "The current state of the game is not the one we wanted you to experience at launch," the developer wrote in a post to Steam, "It might sound cliché, but we were not able to keep up with the rapidly growing playerbase in this short amount of time."
Despite the early-days wobbles, though, Triternion appears to be making good progress hammering bits of server back together with staples and duct tape or however it works. To date, it's managed to fix its gold and XP rewards system, so that both are being distributed properly. All problems with unlocks in the armoury should now be resolved too, and new Server Browser options have been instated, enabling players to filter via server name and ping limit.
All the same, Triternion acknowledges that there's still work to be done, noting that, "Our top priority right now is to iron out the stability problems with our Official Servers, as well as bugs with the Matchmaker." It also says that it's looking into ways to compensate the playerbase, which is a nice gesture. Hopefully its teething troubles will be resolved soon, and players can return to maiming with gleeful abandon, free from online woes.