After recovering from a server issue on both Steam and Wii U in September of 2021, Dark Roast Entertainment announced in October that they would permanently shut down Lucadian Chronicles by the end of March 2022. The Wii U version has already been delisted, presumably after the server outage last September, but the Steam version has remained on sale and dropped to $0.99 just a few days ago. Unfortunately, even the single-player matches are run over a server so after March 31st the entire game will become unplayable.
Dark Roast currently suggests only purchasing the game now to collection and achievement hunters. In a forum reply on March 8th the developers even pointed out that “it’s hard to earn the multiplayer achievements with the lower player base and time / advancement required, so you should get them automatically just for logging in”. The team’s original announcement from October 16th, 2021 follows:
Hi all – we’ve recently run into some issues with the game client being unable to connect to the servers. We have uploaded a new build that hopefully fixes those issues. If you’re still having server issues after updating, or have other problems with the new client, please let us know.
Updating the game at this point is very difficult. The client engine and the server side implementation / tools are old and hard to work with, and some of the server functionality has been changed by our host provider. It’s only a matter of time until it breaks again in a way that is difficult-to-impossible to fix.
As such we are going to wind down support for Lucadian Chronicles within the next 6 months. We will stop selling the game on Steam but it will continue to work for existing owners until the end of March 2022, at which point the servers will go offline and the game will no longer function.
Making the announcement now to give plenty of warning. We hope you’ve enjoyed your time with the game – we’re sad that we have to stop supporting it but we’d rather do it on our terms than wake up one day to find that it’s irrevocably broken.
Thanks to pivuxos for pointing out the upcoming deadline. I’ve added the date to the Watch List calendar and will have a page up on the site later.