Daily Briefing: Friday 15th October

Blizzard respond to ongoing Diablo II: Resurrected server issues

Diablo II: resurrected released back towards the end of September and things have been pretty ropey server-side ever since. The game has frequently suffered from unstable connections, login problems, and some players have reported progress and even characters disappearing into the ether. Blizzard's various customer support accounts have endeavoured to keep the playerbase informed through all this, but what we were really missing was a full official response from Blizzard. Well, this week we actually got one.

• Writing in a lengthy new post on the Blizzard forums, community manager PezRadar went into an impressive amount of detail on what the problems are, what's causing them, and what Blizzard are doing to fix things. In short, legacy code carried over from the original Diablo II as a means to preserve that authentic feel isn't playing well with how modern players interact with the game. Things are just happening too fast and servers are buckling under the pressure. Blizzard are on it though and have been working on several different ways to optimise the process. Login queues are coming soon on PC and should do a decent amount to spread the burden of hundreds of thousands of concurrent players.

Xbox Series X|S top 100K sales in Japan

That's according to a new report from Japanese media outlet Famitsu who, in their most recently weekly chart report, confirmed that the Xbox Series S has sold just over 38K units since its November launch. Add in some 64K for the more expensive Xbox Series X and you get a combined sales total of around 102K consoles. This is a pretty decent showing in isolation but it takes on a new level of impressiveness when you consider that the Xbox One took over four years to reach 100K sales. At this pace the Xbox Series X|S will outpace their predecessor in no time at all.

• Xbox have traditionally had a very difficult time in Japan as a region but that's something they wanted to change this generation, with targeted marketing and a desire to collaborate with Japanese creators forming just part of Microsoft's plan to finally crack the country. The Xbox Series X|S may have a ways to go before they top the 1.6m units the Xbox 360 shifted in Japan, but eclipsing the Xbox One will likely cement this generation as a success out East. The PS5, meanwhile, is absolutely killing it in Japan, selling 1.1m units since launch.

Nintendo apologise for severe Metroid Dread progression bug, fix on the way

Metroid Dread is out in the wild and going over pretty well with fans and newcomers alike. It's been a hot minute since we had an all-new Metroid adventure, and admittedly it's just nice to see Samus back doing her thing. The game isn't without its issues though, and Nintendo have recently confirmed that a fix is in the works for one of Metroid Dread's more serious bugs. Basically, if players destroy a specific door towards the end of the game while its map marker is still active, then the game will crash and display an error message.

• This obviously isn't ideal, and Nintendo were quick to announce that a fix is on the way. A statement published on their official website confirms that the Metroid Dread team "are aware of an error in the Metroid Dread game that prevents the player from proceeding [and] are preparing a software update to prevent this error, which should be available in October 2021." So, the update is set to release at some stage before the end of the month, and in the meantime, players are advised to restart their game when they encounter the error and remove the problematic map marker before attempting the section again. So, there you go.