Phantasy Star Universe Has a Meltdown

The epic RPG game Phantasy Star Universe has run into a black hole, as Sega announced that the servers for the online version of the game would be temporally shut down until October. The game, which has single player and online multiplayer modes, launched on August 31. However, players of the game soon found that the online portion was seriously disabled. Gamers were experiencing blank screens, corrupt data and an assortment of technical issues that prevented the game from operating correctly. Sega addressed the issue by shutting down all of its Phantasy Star Universe servers on September 3 to address the problems. Players who used the 30-day free demo of the online segment will have their accounts restarted upon the October re-launch. However, Sega has indicated that previous player data and progress may “be rolled back or deleted” during the September debugging stage. The process of testing a video game is often a hard and arduous task performed by seasoned QA software testers. Bugs, which are often found in video games after launch, are usually an indication that the defects were not serious enough to downgrade gameplay, and thus, were not deemed important enough to be fixed. However, with serious crash bugs such as the one found in the online portion of Phantasy Star Universe, it is unclear whether oversight or a time crunch is to blame.