If you’ve never heard of the PC shooter, World War 3, then you’re in for a strange tale. The game initially launched in 2018 to a decent amount of interest but it didn’t last, as the player base dropped off almost immediately. For most games, that’s where the story would end, but after continuing to work on the game for a few years, publisher My.Games took it on board, relaunching the game in 2021.
That didn’t quite make the game as successful as the publisher wanted either, and My.Games dropped World War 3. Once again, in any other story, that would be the end. However, World War 3 is back, having just gone free-to-play under a new publisher. This time the game has seen a spike in popularity on the same scale as its initial launch, but it’s almost immediately making headlines for the wrong reasons.
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At first, players were having issues downloading the game, as it wasn’t using Steam’s official servers. This was leading to ridiculously long download times, with some users reporting estimated weeks to download the game. However, even once you get over that hurdle, there are more problems in store.
First, when trying to launch the game you might get hit with error 40302. Exactly what’s causing this is unclear, but it seems to be a problem with the game’s launcher, as it’s not letting people start the game. Someone in a Steam community thread has found that deleting your saved profile data can fix this, but it doesn’t work for everyone.
Secondly, because so many people are having trouble launching the game, getting into a match is extremely difficult, and reports of seemingly endless wait times are commonplace. Then, finally, when you do get into a game, you might be met with the dreaded initializing interface screen, which loads for a little while before failing, asking you to try again, at which point the game closes and you have to start the whole process over again.
The result is that the game’s recent reviews on Steam are overwhelmingly negative, with most reviews deriding all these issues. The community page is full of people suggesting fixes, most of which only work some of the time, so they’re not very useful.
The servers are regularly undergoing maintenance, but it doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem and players are getting understandable impatient waiting for a fix. It’s not impossible that World War 3 irons out these issues and pulls out of the dive, but it needs to happen soon, and it’s looking less likely by the day.
Written by Ryan Woodrow on behalf of GLHF.
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