World War Z has released a patch that should address some of the connectivity issues that has continued to plague players since the game's initial launch on April 16. Although the title seems to have a lot of promise, with many fans reporting excellent gameplay and co-op experiences, its first few days of release were marred with a series of bugs and glitches on all platforms.
On the PC, some players have reported that the game crashes to the desktop before it ever reaches the main screen. Console players reported problems, too. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game had connectivity issues with players being unable to connect to the multiplayer servers, basically keeping gamers from participating in one of the game's most appealing features, online co-op. Main screens continue to show "unable to connect" messages, but even after getting past that, the game often hangs and pops up a "disconnected" message, which also results in players losing Weapon XP. These issues remain troublesome, particularly as the title promises a lot of fun co-op gameplay, which is apparently being delivered—as long as players can get that far.
Fortunately, Focus Home Interactive has issued a fix for the connectivity issues. A post on the official World War Z forums states that the company is not only aware of all the problems, but it will issue a patch soon to address as many of these bugs as possible, including the game crashes on PC, connectivity problems on PC and consoles, as well as other smaller issues players have reported with the title. Focus Home promised that the hot fix would arrive soon and thanked players for their patience:
"We will update this [list of issues] as they get fixed. This is not an exhaustive list, but these are our priority. Thank you so much for your patience. A patch is on the way!"
World War Z is a third-person shooter and four-person co-op title that takes inspiration from the 2013 movie World War Z, which starred Brad Pitt as a former United Nations employee caught up in a race to find a cure for a pandemic that turns people into zombies. The film received mostly positive reviews and earned $540 million at the global box office, meaning that Paramount initially had plans to create a sequel. However, development of that sequel lagged for years, and in the end, Paramount decided to kill the project reportedly over its budget. Fans of the franchise were given new (un)life when a game was announced, and Focus Home's effort has been receiving a lot of praise in the lead-up to launch over both attention to story detail and explosive, exciting co-op gameplay.
The World War Z game can still succeed thanks to the quality of its play experience when it's working, but its buggy launch complicated things. With Focus Home addressing the issues as quickly as it can, there is still a chance that the game will carry the World War Z name into the future and deliver the kind of experience zombie fans have been salivating over ever since the game's first trailers were released. Given that Focus Home is a relatively smaller studio compared to AAA giants, players should at least have a little patience, as it appears the game was more popular than the devs were expecting and thus created a huge strain on the online infrastructure—a good problem to have, provided it gets sorted quickly, which it looks like it will.
Source: Focus Home Interactive