Hotcakes: Studio 8 Says No To Quality

Expects players to delete hardware drivers instead.

Astellia Royal is the free to play spinoff of Astellia Online, and if you were looking forward to playing the game I may have bad news for you. The bad news is that Astellia Royal is broken for a good number of people who play it. The worse news is that the folks at Studio 8 and Way2bit have decided to just not fix it at all. To be fair, “who cares about quality” seems to be the driving motivation behind the game overall.

The good news is that with its 35% mostly negative rating, you’re not missing out on anything by skipping Astellia Royal. Astellia Royal is so poorly programmed that the game’s anti-cheat thinks that certain mouse, keyboard, and headphone drivers are illegal programs and will block people using them from playing completely.

Now an ethical and properly run business might opt to fix that problem. Studio 8 is neither the face of ethics or competence. Nearly a month ago they decided to respond simply by telling players to delete the problematic drivers.

This issue occurs since input device(mouse, keyboard) macro, cheat program, and any illegal programs are executed. Due to these programs, it is not possible to join the game.
In order to access the game, please check if you execute them and try to access again after deleting them. We apologize for the inconvenience and we will do our best to provide better service.

My favorite part of this comment is in the last sentence. It expects the reader to believe Studio 8 or Way2bit care enough to give a real apology. They don’t. It also states that they are doing their best to provide better service. They aren’t. Providing better service and “doing our best” isn’t on the top of either company’s list. In fact it’s not on the list at all.

You might find it buried under the numerous “wring this cow dry and abandon it” listings that come with relaunching a free to play, pay to win version alongside the same game you’re bilking an upfront cost out of, creating two poorly supported versions of the same generic shovelware.