After extensive review of feedback.
I don’t think anyone would be surprised to hear that Shadow Arena wasn’t quite the breakout hit that Pearl Abyss wanted. The game currently sits at a 24 hour peak of 45 concurrent players on Steam and already exists as the spinoff of a previously failed battle royale mode for Black Desert Online. But this week the folks at Pearl Abyss announced some heavy downsizing and shifting in the game’s focus in an effort to revitalize what is left of the player base and get people back into the game.
The most major update is the removal of battle royale as the main game mode. In place of the 1v40 gameplay, Shadow Arena will now primarily be a 3-on-3 fighter with more defined class roles. Battle royale is still available as a private match. The number of heroes has been reduced to eight with characters being added back as they are rebalanced for the new primary game mode.
The Shadow Arena mode itself is now time-limited depending on the day and your server region. For example in North America on weekdays the mode will only be available between 4p.m. and 11p.m. PST. For those in Europe the mode will be available between 6 p.m. and 1 a.m.
Another unfortunate side effect of the downsizing is that support for the grand majority of international languages has ceased. Shadow Arena is no longer available in Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, Thai, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. The remaining languages are English, Korean, and Chinese (traditional and simplified).
Sufficive to say the community has not taken kindly to the update. The actual update went live on January 7 and over the past week players have been dropping negative reviews on Steam to express their dismay at the radical changes. Negative reviews take aim at the gutting of content, removal of heroes and skins (much of which people paid real money for), and the radical shift in vision taken so far into the beta.
For more on the latest changes, check out the patch notes.
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