Last Oasis burst due to popularity, so it's offline for a week for fixes

Success has proved troublesome for Last Oasis, the new survival sandbox MMO with wooden walking bases. After launching into early access on Thursday, it hit #6 on Steam's top-selling chart for the whole week, it passed 25,000 players in-game at the same time, and it fell over so hard that the developers have taken it offline for a week. Bugs exacerbated by the weight of players caused the servers to crumple and it needs serious help. If you don't want to wait for its return, you're welcome to a refund.

Last Oasis has suffered connection issues since Thursday's launch, and its support Twitter account lists the fixes and fiddlings they'd tried to get it going. This video detailed the big issue, a problem with the master server that stopped players from connecting. Enough problems persisted that serious action was needed.

The developers, Donkey Crew said in Sunday night's announcement that they "decided to take all servers offline to give our engineers time to investigate without new pressure for about 7 days." The game being multiplayer, it's unplayable until then.

"Our coders have been working day and night to solve this issue and they need some sleep. We need to properly investigate why our load-testing didn't pick this up, and what went wrong, and figure it out properly and solve it," Donkey Crew's project lead explained in a video. You can almost see their efforts on his face.

"A lot of you mentioned this is not how an early access game should launch, and we fully agree: this is absolutely not how an early access game should launch," he continued. "So we decided that everyone who's currently unhappy with the state of the game should get a full refund regardless of their in-game hours, no questions asked."

This might be a bummer and a let-down for would-be players, but does sound sensible for the situation the game's in. You'll have until Wednesday to claim that uncontested refund if you want it.

Despite this crippling problem, players reviewing it on Steam do broadly seem to like what they managed to play, and many are keen for its return. Holding onto 45% positive reviews despite being literally unplayable is quite impressive.