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Ring of Elysium’s new game mode arrives later today, and Tencent is sorry for the delay

A timezone mix-up led players to staying up all night to play an update that wasn't happening until the next day.

Ring of Elysium is getting a brand new game mode called From Dusk Till Dawn later today, which adds punishing survival mechanics to the free-to-play battle royale. Unfortunately, Tencent got players excited a bit early when the developer forgot to account for time zones in the update post, leading some fans to wait up all night for an update that wasn’t coming until this evening.

First off, From Dusk Till Dawn challenges players to survive the brutal cold of its Ymir snowstorms by foraging for food and keeping warm by fires – in addition to defending themselves from other players. During the Ymir surges, you’ll have to scurry indoors and find a source of heat or freeze to death. The idea is to survive until dawn, which happens about 20 minutes into the game in this new mode.

So it’s a new twist on battle royale, and fans were naturally pretty excited. But when Tencent posted the patch notes and information about a delay caused by technical issues, the company forgot to account for time zones, and many players in North America and Europe thought they’d be playing From Dusk Till Dawn much earlier than was planned.

For a sense of what the new mode is like, check out the From Dusk Till Dawn trailer:


Today, Tencent issued a rather abject apology for the mix-up, saying the team had “completely forgotten” to take account of time zone differences around the globe.

“We want to express our most sincere apologies for all the problems caused by our mistakes on this update,” the team wrote in the post to the Ring of Elysium Steam page. “Since we provide Ring of Elysium to players living in different time zones around the globe, we failed to do our jobs, which is to carefully make development plans, meet our deadlines, and notify all players as soon as possible when we make any changes.”

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Eager players won’t get their night of sleep back, but they did get a fairly heartfelt apology. And they don’t have much longer to wait, either – From Dusk Till Dawn is now scheduled to launch tonight or early tomorrow morning, depending on where you live. Servers will be down today from 16:00-18:00 PST, which translates to tomorrow from 0:00-2:00 GMT. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to hop into From Dusk Till Dawn and find out how well battle royale goes with a case of frostbite.