Peak rose to fame almost overnight with this indie co-op climbing game selling two million copies in just nine days. But with this success came a little chaos. Developers Aggro Crab and Landfall came together to make this game for a game jam and as a way to decompress from making bigger games, it was never meant for hundreds of thousands of players to enjoy all at once.
“So, let’s talk about stability,” Landcrab says in a blog post. “The sheer number of people playing this game means that we’re often hearing about hardware or network-specific issues that our internal testers have a lot of trouble catching because, well, there aren’t 100,000 of them. Recently this resulted in a patch going live that made a number of players totally unable to play the game, and we had to roll it back immediately. That’s bad.”
The patch in question was 1.6.a which has now “been reverted due to a variety of bug reports that were missed in testing”. The patch was meant to “dramatically improve the stability” allowing players to reconnect to lost games and just a plethora of bug fixes. But while this may not be in effect any more the devs are still looking for ways to improve stability and dish out more bug fixes.
“To help with the stability of future major patches, we’re going to be opening up a public beta Steam branch,” the post continues. “This will allow anyone who wants to play with new, possibly unstable features to do so safely and report issues to us before they go live to the greater community.”
You can access the public beta testing branch by doing the following:
- Go to Steam and find Peak in your library.
- Right-click the game and go to “Properties”.
- In the new window find the beta section and enter the password: playpeakbeta
This will let you into the forbidden realm where you can play all the quirky and buggy features safely. But you don’t have to do this, for those who’d rather a more stable game than just carry on as usual with the base game and wait for the new features to release when they’re ready and bug-free.
The only issues I’ve encountered so far have been to do with stability. Instead of selecting Vulkan, which seems to crash all my games and boil my PC, I’ve started using DX12 which hasn’t kicked me out of any games so far, fingers crossed. But even with all the creepy crawlies and stability wobbles I’ve still loved every second of Peak, none of the issues have created a negative experience for me and I’ll keep on climbing no matter what kind of bugs are in my way.
Read the full article here
