After years of waiting, the Hytale servers have spun up and fans are jumping into early access. Demand has apparently blown past the expectations of Hypixel Studios, but amid some surprisingly sporadic reports of server issues, the devs say not to worry – they will make sure you're able to log in during a "bumpy" launch week.
In a blog post outlining what to expect at this early access release, the devs say that "demand has exceeded our expectations, which means launch week will be bumpy, but we'll get everyone in." Lead dev Simon Collins-Laflamme previously noted that the team expects "over 1 million players" on launch day, which is a lot to manage.
Anecdotally, however, it seems that Hytale is enduring the launch day stress just fine so far. You will find reports on social media of players unable to login or connect to friends, but those reports are much fewer and further between than I've come to expect from a launch of this scale.
"Behind the scenes, the team over the past few weeks has worked hard to build a stronger technical foundation for Hytale, including performance improvements, robust server systems, and UI and audio frameworks," the devs add in their blog. "The platform infrastructure also evolved into a full ecosystem, including a new launcher, patching system, account management services, store integration, telemetry, and backend systems designed to support scale and live operations. All of this, in just two months!"
Clearly, that extra work is paying off in what seems so far to be a pretty stable launch. The Hytale roadmap is still taking shape, but early updates will focus on technical issues. In a recent tweet, technical director Slikey says, "We are already working on a patch for bugs and crashes. That will hit the pre-release patchline once we have a good chunk of fixes."
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