Launching an online game is difficult, that’s true. While it’s been a while since we last witnessed a historic launch disaster, Diablo 4 seems to want to remind everyone just how good we’ve been lately.
Somehow, the game’s first expansion, Ships of Hate, launched much worse than the main game. Players spent hours unable to play the game as they waited for an update from Blizzard.
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“Hateship” was originally scheduled to be released at 4pm Pacific Time (Blizzard HQ time), but just before the release, Blizzard announced that the release would be postponed. The developer didn’t provide a timetable, saying that while the expansion is still expected to launch “this evening,” more time is needed to ensure everyone can start playing the game at the same time.
Then, when players want to play the game, they’re locked out, which is interesting and even a little sad in its own right.
“We apologize for the latest breaking news regarding time-shifting, but this is an important step we need to take to ensure every player can start their Nahantu journey together,” community lead Adam Fletcher wrote.
Over the next few hours, Blizzard continued to release updates to the community, and then some bad news emerged. There seems to be an issue with the version that most players have preloaded, so to make sure everyone is on the same version and can start playing the game at the same time, the developers have to push out a major update.
The update is 24-35GB in size, and the Battle.net servers were predictably hit hard as everyone tried to download it at once, slowing down the process even further. Blizzard initially expected a delay of two hours, but later increased it to four hours, and that’s assuming you can download the patch quickly enough.
Hateship is now available, but the release version is still pretty rough after all. On the Diablo 4 subreddit, many players are complaining about various bugs. Some affect the new area of Nahantu, while others prevent some new mechanics (such as boiling opals) from functioning.
In fact, there seems to be a repeatable (if not-annoying) issue that causes the game to think a player doesn’t own an aggro container before coming to its senses and allowing them to play the expansion.
One player who just purchased the expansion via an in-game link said that while the money was taken from their Steam wallet, they couldn’t choose a new Spiritborn class to start the game, which must have been frustrating.
Things are a bit messy right now, and it’s unclear which issues are caused by server failures and which require further patches to resolve. We will keep you updated on the situation. In the meantime, why not check out our guide on the best and fastest ways to level up in Containers of Hate/Season 6? It will help you make up for some lost time.
