Lost Ark is live after multiple launch day delays

Update: Lost Ark's free-to-play launch is live following a pair of launch day delays, Amazon Games has announced.

Earlier on Friday, it was announced that the launch would be delayed due to "deployment issues," but a few hours later it went live. However, shortly thereafter players began reporting that characters were missing from the game, so Amazon took down the game to deploy a hotfix.

At the time of writing, the most recent update says the "Lost Ark servers are online and ready for play."

Amazon says it's patched in a fix for the missing characters and pushed out a new build on Steam, which means you'll need to close out the game, download a new update, and log back in to play the game. Another recent update confirms that the Auction House has been taken down in US West servers while developers investigate issues and come up with a resolution.

All that said, it should be in relative working order going into the weekend US time. Amazon says it's continuing to monitor player population and will add new servers as needed.

Original story follows...

On the day if its planned launch, Lost Ark has been delayed due to deployment issues, Amazon has announced.

Lost Ark was due to launch today, Friday, February 11, but it seems the developers need a little more time preparing the servers for the influx of new players. In a tweet shared today, the Amazon Game Studios and the Lost Ark development team said they hope to have the issue sorted out in just a few hours, so it doesn't sound like they expect this to be a long delay at all.

"Unfortunately, due to deployment issues, launch is delayed," reads the tweet. "We hope to have this resolved in a matter of hours. Your patience is appreciated and we'll update you soon."

Though it doesn't appear to be an issue that'll persist into the weekend, it is unexpected, and pretty dang unprecedented, for a game to be delayed on its release date. The developers even tweeted a cheerful "Good morning" just minutes before they announced the delay.

Just yesterday, the devs shared a development update acknowledging issues players were facing in the lead-up to the game's free-to-play launch (the head start launch was a few days ago for folks with the founders packs). In it, the developers acknowledged "a massive number" of players joining the game and announced that they would be "opening up additional servers in each region to help support the influx of new players."

For more on the above, check out our piece on why Lost Ark is blowing up on Steam.