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Will Pokémon Legends: Arceus be the turning point in the Pokémon series?
A few days ago The Pokémon Company unveiled a new trailer for Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The footage gave us a further glimpse of the Game Freak title’s peculiarities, which seems so far removed from its predecessors, reinforcing the idea that we could be looking at a game of fundamental importance for the future of the series.
Pokémon Legends: Arceus is finally something new and different. It takes the conceptual foundations of the franchise, but experiments and dares a lot. First and foremost with an open world that looks vast and places a strong emphasis on exploration with the trusty Pokémon, delighting millions of fans. But the boldest innovations undoubtedly concern the combat system.
Say goodbye to virtual arenas, fight on the spot, just toss in the Poké Ball with one of your trusty allies inside, and it’s on. There’s also no more alternating rounds, now there’s a real order of action, with faster Pokémon might even pull off two moves in a row. Add to that the new Quick and Powerful Techniques, which could bring a deep new strategic component to battles. In short, Pokémon Legends: Arceus already promises to bring more novelties than any other chapter in the main series and to change a game formula that is perhaps starting to get a little stale.
In all this, it’s a little surprising that the attention of a large proportion of users is focused on the technical side. Obviously, the eye wants its part too, and undoubtedly Pokémon Legends: Arceus doesn’t shine in terms of graphics, and even the animations leave a lot to be desired, although the developers still have several months to iron out the imperfections. But is it right to focus so much on graphics when we could be looking at a revolution in the Pokémon franchise?
Pokémon Legends: Arceus has been perceived as a spin-off since its announcement, but it was never presented as such. In fact, with the latest trailer, we got the feeling that it’s more of an appetizer for what might come next. In some ways it’s a brave project that dares to experiment, offering interesting mechanics, some of which fans of the series have been asking for. An incubator of ideas, a playground for GameFreak’s developers, where they can take the concept behind the franchise and play with its rules. If this is the case, Pokémon Legends: Arceus could prove to be one of the most important titles in the entire series, and we wouldn’t be surprised if future projects inherit some of the innovations we’ll see in January.
Big graphics and cool animations will have to wait. Game Freak has moved to Nintendo HQ, which we’re sure will bring great benefits over time, but after all, not even a year has passed since then. However, the future of the series, the one that matters at least, may already be in the offing and could give us a glimpse of how the Pokémon franchise will evolve over the next few years.
On February 11th the new MMORPG Lost Ark was released in its Free2Play version for all people who just want to try it. That’s a lot though, which is why the game is still struggling with server issues. That should change now.
Update 8:05 a.m.: The servers are now down.
When will the servers shut down? As announced by Amazon via the Lost Ark official website, the servers will go offline this morning, that is, on February 13, at 8 a.m. GMT.
The downtime affects all European servers equally and you will not be able to log into the game in the meantime.
How long will they stay offline? The maintenance work is planned for about 3 hours. So if all goes well, you’ll be able to return to the world of Arkesia at 11 a.m.
We’ll keep you up to date in the live ticker when the servers return and if there will be any delays again.
Lost Ark’s last scheduled server maintenance was scheduled for 4 hours, but ended up lasting over 10 hours, leading to some negative reviews on Steam.
Why are the servers going down? Since Lost Ark was released, the new MMORPG has been struggling with long queues and server problems. At the prime time on February 12, more than 1.3 million people played the action game at the same time.
This also meant that some servers had to be completely closed to new players. Especially the server Asta, on which many German players gather, is affected by long queues.
Sometimes the fans have to wait up to 6 hours just to log in. Incidentally, this only works if you already have a character on the Asta server. New players were completely denied access until the evening hours of February 12th.
To address this situation, Amazon is working with Smilegate to increase server capacity. At this point, however, they are not telling us exactly how this is supposed to work.
Are the queues gone then? No, probably not. In the blog post, the publishers emphasize that they only want to create the basic framework for further updates and more server capacities during the downtime.
We, therefore, do not assume that you will be able to continue gambling directly at 11 a.m. without queues, even if that would be desirable.
Today at 6 p.m. the Lost Ark servers should (re)open to all players after the scheduled maintenance. But nothing will come of the official Lost Ark Launch! The launch is delayed due to “deployment issues”.
An exact time when the servers will go online again has not yet been announced. “We hope that this problem will be fixed in a few hours,” the announcement simply says.
We’ll keep you posted on updates here!
Unfortunately, the launch has been delayed due to deployment issues. We hope this will be fixed in a few hours.
Your patience is appreciated and we will update you soon.
Restart Lost Ark Client
We have received important information from the Community Team. Waiting in the server screen doesn’t seem to help. The server list does not appear there automatically. So a reboot is required.
Waiting at the server screen won’t help, as it will require a fresh launch of the client as far as I’m aware.
You can read our guide for Lost Ark here.
Lost Ark has been better received than many thought. Even Amazon did not expect this rush. And so there were long queues on some servers, as was the case with New World. Since a real server change is not possible, many players simply created a new character on a new server. However, some of these players have already redeemed their pioneer package on the first server and thus used it up unnecessarily.
As Amazon has now announced, we will get an additional set of exclusive items on the new server. These items are bound to the character and thus cannot be traded. They can soon be redeemed on every new server.
During the Head Start period for Lost Ark, a massive number of heroes arrived in Arkesia. While we are thrilled to have so many players joining us, we also recognize that this has brought about large queues on our more popular servers, leading to a less than ideal experience for these players.
In an effort to improve the player experience for those who have faced queues, we will be taking several steps to put preventative measures in place ahead of our full launch tomorrow morning, in addition to addressing some of the outstanding issues surrounding Founder’s Pack claims.
Founder’s Pack Redemptions
Players have let us know one of the reasons they are reluctant to switch to lower population servers is because many of them have already redeemed their Founder’s Packs on another server. To help combat this and make exploring new servers a more reasonable choice, we will be granting ALL Founder’s Pack purchasers that redeem their pack by 12 PM PT (8 PM UTC) on Monday, February 14th with an extra set of the exclusive items from the Founder’s Pack they redeemed (e.g., the Founder’s Exclusive Pet and Founder’s Title from the Bronze pack; see full list below) as well as some additional Royal Crystals for Silver, Gold, and Platinum Pack purchasers. These items will not be tradeable, and will be delivered to a player’s Product Inventory so they can be claimed on a new server. Your original Founder’s Pack will not be affected by this, and will remain on the initial server where you redeemed it (or in your Product Inventory, if you have not yet redeemed it).
We are currently working to get these item grants ready to go, and will update players when they are ready to claim — these will be claimable on any new server you choose, so in the meantime we encourage you to find a perfect server to call home.
Bronze Pack
Founder’s Title*
Founder’s Exclusive Pet (Untradeable)
Silver Pack
150 Royal Crystals
Founder’s Title*
Founder’s Exclusive Pet (Untradeable)
Gold Pack
500 Royal Crystals
Founder’s Title*
Founder’s Exclusive Pet (Untradeable)
Northern Lawmaker Skin (Untradeable)
Platinum Pack
1,000 Royal Crystals
Founder’s Title*
Founder’s Exclusive Pet (Untradeable)
Northern Lawmaker Skin (Untradeable)
Founder’s Platinum Skin (Untradeable)
Founder’s Exclusive Mount (Untradeable)
Platinum Welcome Crate (Untradeable)
Founder’s Exclusive Wallpaper*
Founder’s Exclusive Structure
Legendary Rapport Gift Selection Chest
Launch Limited Card Pack
*If the Founder’s Title or Founder’s Exclusive Wallpaper are used on the same Roster where a pack has already been redeemed, you will not be able to use these items.
Please note that this is a one-time grant, and we do not have plans to continue to make additional grants of items available to players in the future. For example, there will be Starter Packs available for purchase at full launch tomorrow (more details to come), and we highly recommend only redeeming them once you settle into your permanent home server.
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