Yesterday, I watched with a bit of sadness as my colleagues queued up for the new "Dragonflight" (opens in new tab) expansion for "World of Warcraft." I was glad I wasn't trying to play a massively multiplayer game on launch day, I thought. The server load is negligible, and the only way for developers to prevent that load is to implement a login queue.

This morning I took a big sip of water and hit the play button on Warhammer 40K: Darktide. Hoi.

Fatshark's last two co-op browsers, Vermintide and Vermintide 2, both ran on peer-to-peer networking; with Darktide, Fatshark switched to a dedicated server to make the hub world a more player space to make it easier for players to interact with each other. The change will hopefully pay off with smoother live play and a more flexible live service model for adding new quests and items to the game. But at the very least, there will be lines of people waiting to log in on launch day.

In our experience, however, the queue is not bad.

When we reached the front of the line and got the "BACKEND ERROR: Error signing in" message, there was a moment of panic, but thankfully we were able to press close and continue the login process and had no problems. My beta character and all progress was carried over and I was able to connect to the server without any problems. [As of this writing, Steam has 80,246 players, and that number is likely to grow. However, unless the servers go bad, you shouldn't have to wait too long to get into the game.