Future 2 used to have little or no downtime. Now, the sci-fi MMO goes offline at the very least as soon as every week, typically extra, as error codes and unplanned outages forestall gamers from logging on and finishing their weekly quests, challenges, and loot drops. Now Bungie has lastly supplied some solutions, and so they’re about as technical, advanced, and nuanced as you’d count on.
Initially launched in 2017, Future 2 has grown loads through the years. Annual expansions added new missions, places, and gameplay mechanics, whereas cross-play and cross-save integration linked gamers from opposing platforms. A “next-gen” improve for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Collection X/S radically improved the appear and feel of the sport on console, and a seasonal roadmap means new content material is getting added to the sport virtually each week.
The steadiness of Future 2 has at all times ebbed and flowed, however just lately issues have taken a transparent flip for the more serious. Previous to Lightfall, the sport felt prefer it was being held collectively by duct tape, and after the enlargement launched in February gamers grew to become accustomed to checking the Bungie Help Twitter account frequently to see the standing of the sport’s servers and discover out if the always-online recreation had randomly been shut down for upkeep or not.
In response to a rising variety of participant issues and questions, Bungie supplied a mini-technical deep-dive into one of many methods that’s paramount to operating an enormous live-service recreation and one of many causes issues have felt so tough currently. “When gameplay messages from Future 2 are acquired, they’re despatched to a key service known as ‘Claims,’ which then routes them onto the server that’s answerable for your participant knowledge,” the studio wrote. “That is an important service for maintaining the shopper and server in sync throughout each second of gameplay.”
With the launch of Lightfall, Bungie apparently tried to replace this technique to make it extra resilient, particularly at increased concurrent participant numbers. It was clearly an excellent transfer, too, since Future 2 hit its highest-ever concurrent participant numbers on Steam when the enlargement arrived. However the enhancements additionally launched different points which have in the end led to a rise in error messages acquired by gamers, and thus the necessity to take the entire recreation offline at instances.
Bungie writes,
Usually, if Claims has its communication channels disrupted to different providers, it’s designed to mechanically restore these connections. These disruptions can occur for all kinds of causes, together with {hardware} failures, community hitches, or issues with different providers. Nonetheless, regardless of rigorous testing, the up to date system shouldn’t be at all times recovering as anticipated in our stay recreation setting. If these channels are completely disrupted, this may be one of many causes behind Weasel, Baboon, or different error codes for a big subset of the participant base. In these instances, even a rolling restart of our Claims service shouldn’t be at all times sufficient to revive the service. As an alternative, a full restart of our Future 2 providers have to be carried out to revive the Claims system, which we’re quickly working to right.
The studio goes on to level out that whereas addressing the problems with Claims is a excessive precedence, messing it up will make issues a complete lot worse, so it is going to take a bit. Within the meantime, Bungie outlined the enhancements to stability gamers can count on within the present and upcoming seasons. A mid-season 21 replace will cease stability from getting any worse, whereas a season 22 launch replace will convey a “self-healing” capability to Future 2‘s Claims system that can make outages much less frequent. A season 23 replace ought to convey much more enhancements.
Lengthy story brief: issues ought to begin getting higher quickly, starting with the season 22 replace on August 22. Bungie cautions that any change to those methods can quickly make issues worse earlier than they get higher, however the principle takeaway is that the studio is conscious of the problems and dealing on a long-term plan to take care of them, hopefully earlier than season 24 launches alongside subsequent yr’s long-awaited The Last Form enlargement.