Blood Bowl 3 multiplayer fixes are coming, developer Cyanide Studio announced via Steam and in its social media communities on Thursday. Blood Bowl 3 launched in full on Thursday, but players who bought the upgraded Blood Bowl 3 Brutal Edition have been able to play since Monday – it hasn’t been a smooth experience.
The servers for Blood Bowl III had a “hard time handling the load during the early unlock”, according to Cyanide Studio’s announcement. Steam Charts doesn’t yet have data for Blood Bowl III’s simultaneous players, but Steam reports 20,000 people currently own the game.
Cyanide’s statement adds that the studio “is currently deploying new servers as we speak and preparing a patch that will help manag[e] the server load”. The servers went down around 5.30 PST / 8.30am EST / 1.30 pm GMT on Thursday for the maintenance, ahead of the game unlocking to players who bought the normal edition of the game.
Cyanide has already patched Blood Bowl III once. Patch notes published on Tuesday list fixes for problems including five types of crashes, “soft locks against AI”, improvements to servers, bugs that stopped UI elements working, and more.
Project Manager Gautier Brésard predicted there would be problems with multiplayer when we interviewed him, but he wasn’t commenting about server stability – he thought problems might come from a compounding runaway leader effect with very successful teams overtaking leagues.
Our Blood Bowl 3 review was generally positive, other than criticising the Blood Bowl AI and noting a crash that came up in one match against the computer: it seems we had an unusually smooth experience.
Blood Bowl 3 is an adaptation of Blood Bowl Second Season Edition, the 2020 version of the venerable miniature wargame set in Warhammer The Old World, and is widely regarded as one of the best board games for its huge multiplayer community, asymmetric and characterful teams, and challenging risk / reward gameplay.