If you’ve been waiting for ArcheAge in the West and just can’t wait anymore to give the game a try, you may want to turn to the game’s Russian servers next week as the game enters open beta under Mail.ru.
ArcheAge Russia will be the earliest launch English speakers will be able to get into until Trion Worlds officially launches beta in the West, though it will (of course) be in Russian. Korea requires a social security number to sign up, and the Japanese version is pay to play. The Chinese open beta should be launching sometime within the next few months, as it entered its most recent closed beta period in December.
The Russian open beta will begin on February 22 at 10AM Moscow time. For those of us not living in Russia, this equates to 1PM PST/4PM EST/6PM GMT.
You can sign up on the official ArcheAge RU registration page. This version is free to play, but there are restrictions on free accounts. These are laid out on this official blog post., which Google Translate does a fairly good job of translating.
Something to note mentioned in above blog post: some skills have been changed to accommodate for higher ping in international versions of the game, including the Russian, Chinese, and North American releases. This appears to affect skills which initially took multiple key presses to fully pull off in the Korean and Japanese versions of the game.
Will you be giving the Russian open beta a try? With ArcheAge‘s China’s open beta not too far off, I may just be waiting for Tencent’s “special” brand of F2P instead of giving Mail.ru’s servers a go. Those of you on the fence between the two may want to remember the Chinese version will almost definitely have a fatigue system, but may be a bit more lax on free player restrictions.
Interestingly enough, Trion Worlds isn’t too far behind in terms of localization.
The Western fanbase likes to complain and make jokes about Trion and how their slow their handling of ArcheAge has been, but the game only really made it to Korea and Japan in 2013. The game will not only be making its way to Russia and China this year, but also to the West.
Trion Worlds may end up being a few months late, but they are certainly not that far behind Tencent and Mail.ru. Considering the massive sizes of both companies in comparison, Trion Worlds isn’t going that slowly at all.
