Prosecuting the issues plaguing Watchmen: Justice is Coming

When Watchmen: Justice is Coming appeared on the App Store on the night of Friday, March 6, thousands of iPhone gaming night owls were left with little to play. Instead of the massively multiplayer adventure Watchmen fans had been promised, Warner Bros and developer Last Legion had delivered a game unplayable to all but a lucky few.

Just days after being heralded as an ambitious new frontier for iPhone gaming, Watchmen: Justice is Coming had devolved into a mess: failed connections, chronically slow performance, and total crashes.

The day before the game's release we had spoken directly with Last Legion's Seth Gerson about the game's inventive approach to online play, his lofty design rocketing our interest in what was an unknown title a week earlier.

We remain optimistic about the potential for the game to capitalise on those aspirations, yet Watchmen: Justice is Coming is still plagued by crashes and failed connections - a killer for a game dependent on the network for play.

It took three days for Last Legion to even own up to the issues gamers were experiencing. All the while, Watchmen: Justice is Coming continued to rack up sales on the App Store in its dysfunctional state. Instead of having it temporarily taken down from the store or updating the listing, Warner Bros and Last Legion allowed iPhone gamers to buy broken copies of the game without any definitive word on an update to address major game-breaking bugs.

What's frustrating isn't so much the poor way in which these problems have been handled in the time since the game's release, but the fact that the potential for an amazing experience is being lost on silly mistakes.

In a written statement to us Monday Last Legion admits, "Watchmen: Justice is Coming is a very ambitious project, and we obviously needed to work out a few kinks before we can guarantee a stable game that works consistently on the iPhone."

Why was the game released when it was known to be unstable?

Last Legion claims problems following the game's availability on the App Store were a result of not being able to issue a beta test period for the title. That doesn't, however, explain away the game's instability and frequent crashes.

While the lack of a beta can explain connection issues and other problems related to network play, it can't be directly faulted for game crashes that occur just by loading up the main menu.

The focus is being put squarely on the servers as the culprit of the game's troubles. "We apologise for the server issues that people experience," Last Legion writes, taking the opportunity to pay the game a compliment. "We had no idea that demand would be that huge. In response we changed out server hardware on the cloud and that has fixed the log-in and database issues."

Server troubles aren't all that plague the game, though.

Nestled within a huge list of bugs addressed in the developer's forthcoming update are fixes to problems that have nothing to do with sever performance.

Along with fixing "various crashes [and] stability issues," a host of non-server-related flaws have been dealt with including play-balancing of the experience system, fixes to the story panels, animations, camera angle tweaks, inventory improvements, etc. Even new artwork is on the way.

This puts into question the state of Watchmen: Justice is Coming on the day of release. Was this game finished or simply rushed to parallel the theatrical release of Zack Snyder's Watchmen film? The unplayable game that sits on thousands of iPhones suggests the latter.

The apology Last Legion has made is the start of a mea culpa that will continue when the developer's recently-submitted update is approved by Apple.

It's a positive sign that the pieces are being put back together. "The team at Last Legion is just barely coming up for air after 11 days on the App Store," they confess. Breathe, Last Legion - and upset gamers, you do the same.

While frustration is warranted, justice is coming.