Hi everyone!
For the past six months, we’ve been trying to make Epic Online Services work reliably for every player in our game. We’ve found a few ways to fix connection issues that help—but not for everyone.
Why do we use Epic Online Services?
There are many reasons, from technical considerations to our goal of implementing console cross-play (the game isn’t out on consoles yet, but cross-play is already working in our development environment).
What’s wrong with Epic Online Services?
For the most part, nothing. The main issue is that Epic rents servers from Amazon, and their IP addresses are heavily blocked by network providers in the CIS and some other regions.
What are the solutions?
We don’t want to inconvenience our players, but we also can’t fully move away from EOS. So we’re offering an alternative: in the steam-only branch, we’ve uploaded a separate build that lets you connect to other players more reliably. This branch includes almost all the same features as the main one: sessions, achievements, leaderboards, cosmetics—and all your progress carries over between branches, so you can switch back to the default branch whenever you want.
Of course, you won’t be able to connect with players on the main branch, and they won’t be able to connect with you either.
The steam-only branch will be updated in sync with the main branch, so you won’t miss any updates.
For now, the cross-play branch with EOS will remain the default. If we see strong demand for steam-only, or if issues with Amazon’s servers continue to grow, we’ll make steam-only the default branch.
How to switch to the branch
Right-click the game in your Steam Library, select Properties, open the Betas tab, and choose the steam-only branch. The game will reinstall automatically. Have fun!
Thank you for your understanding. If anything in the steam-only branch concerns you, feel free to message us through any channel (including the comments under this post).