Sword Art Online: Variant Showdown set to shut down its servers for a year to perform extended maintenance
Despite having only launched a few months ago, the reasonably successful action RPG Sword Art Online: Variant Showdown will be entering a hiatus period of sorts come September 23rd. The game will be taken down to perform an extended year-long maintenance, where just about every single part of the game that players have not enjoyed will be addressed.
Looking for a different action roleplaying game to play with Variant Showdown shutting down for a bit? Check out our Top 10 best aRPGs for Android!
This is a pretty wild move that not many developers have performed to my knowledge. It’s obviously kind of a bummer, especially since the game is so fresh, but it does make it clear that the developers behind Variant Showdown must care about the product a lot. Where a lot of other games would simply shut down when deemed unsuccessful, Variant Showdown is planning to come back better and stronger, and that shows that the dev team is listening and intends to fix what needs to be fixed.
These problems range in severity, from simple things like character balance and general bugs to bigger things like the overall lifespan of the game based on the currently available content. So when I say that just about every single bit of the game is being touched upon during this year-long maintenance period, I do mean every single bit. The dev team is leaving no stone unturned.
Frankly, I think this is a pretty excellent thing to do, and it’s sure to inspire a lot of faith in the developers. They missed the first time around, but they’ve recognized it, and are even offering players who progressed within the current version of Variant Showdown a full data transfer to the new version when it launches next year.
On top of this, premium currency purchasing will be shut down on August 31st, so nobody is losing out on any money or investment into the game. If you want to check out the current version of Variant Showdown yourself and see what will be adjusted when the next version comes out, you can download it for free at either of the links below now.
