Developer of Medieval multiplayer melee slasher Mordhau apologises after unexpectedly strong launch hobbles servers

Mordhau is a medieval multiplayer slasher built around first-person hand-to-hand combat. It's daft, gory, and has rocketed up Steam's concurrent player chart since launching on April 29th. Unfortunately, its sudden success has caught developer Triternion off-guard, with wonky server performance rather spoiling the fun of lobbing someone's head off with a well-swung sword.

It's not particularly hard to see why a game of chaotic battlefield mayhem, in which everyone runs around with wild abandon armed with a variety of sharp, stabby things, might capture people's imagination enough to turn it into Steam's 11 most popular title at the time of writing, particularly given its sharp visuals, in-depth character customisation, and surprising nuanced melee combat. And players are having great fun sharing their happiest memories of flying limbs and entrails from Mordhau's 64-player team death match and battle royale modes.

Unfortunately, all that attention hasn't been too kind to Mordhau's servers, and developer Triternion has now apologised for the game's less-than-satisfactory online performance. "The current state of the game is not the one we wanted you to experience at launch," the developer wrote in a post to Steam, "It might sound cliché, but we were not able to keep up with the rapidly growing playerbase in this short amount of time."

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