I'm curious, has there ever been a big game that had a stellar launch? Every time there is a major online component to a game, the launch is always terrible.

I don't remember it well enough at this point but I think Guild Wars 2 launched okay. It was missing features and was somewhat laggy (people were transferred around overflow servers too) but I got to play the minute it launched. The free server transfers helped too. It wasn't great but it wasn't too terrible.

I remember that being very frustrating that I couldn't play with my friends because some of us were always put in the overflow server.

If I remember correctly, if you were in a party together you can choose to be placed in the same overflow server. I remember playing with a friend at launch day but I could be wrong. Still it was way better than a lot of other online games where you either end up on a login queue or can't login altogether.

For me the Origin client still has my Sim City game greyed out and says "Not Yet released". Apparently this is a very common issue right now. So they managed to hit the grand daddy of all release day issues, no actual game for a lot of the customer base.

Check out Diablo 3... last year... couple days of full hatred and fighting to get on server.

@MstrMnyBgs I had that problem too, but then I found out that there's a tiny refresh button in the upper left of the games page. I clicked that, and it suddenly appeared!

What kind of client needs a refresh button btw?

@noli: To be honest, Blizzard made bank and 12+ million said it was worth it, 6 million at launch...so that's still 6 million who bought it well after all the problems with networks.

StarCraft 2 had a really smooth launch. If I remember correctly, the servers got hammered pretty hard around the midnight launch, but by around noonish the next day everything was golden. The Old Republic had a pretty stellar launch for an MMO too. But they let people who bought the super limited editions or whatever they called in a few days early so I'm sure that helped a bit too. But yeah, for a new game in a series that has never really had any serious sort of multiplayer aspect to it to be online all the time is bullshit. Just total bullshit.

I agree.

Well to take advantage of free game weekends on Steam I always need to quit the Steam client and log back in before the game will appear in my library. A refresh button would be nice actually.

21 hours into launch day, and my copy (pre-ordered way back in October) is still locked and unplayable. Can't even download it.

Launch day issues yes, but for something that never needed to be online/multiplayer? Ugh, it's a disaster. I can't get it to stop locking up on me after I've built a city and erasing everything.

Locking up? Luxury. At least you have it installed, and you're able to start playing. Origin is still telling me the game isn't released yet.

The Old Republic had about as good of a launch as you can hope for. They still ran into some full server issues but there's not much to do about that and you were always able to log on.