Ask and ye shall receive, it seems. Following the slight disaster that was the Battlefield 1943 Xbox 360 launch this week, local gamers were crying out for Australian servers for the game. Not only would it reduce the load on the international boxes, but it'd mean that we'd be able to play the game with decent ping.

Well, according to Gordon Van Dyke from DICE, salvation will arrive "within the next few days", with official word that we'll be getting local servers for the game. Without a trace of hyperbole, Mr. Van Dyke explains that this "should make your experience 1,000,000,000,000 times better!"

The official forums have the full story:

I had to fight hard to get this after we got the sales numbers and Australia had really low sales numbers, it was 8 times less than Japan, 24 times less than the UK, and 34 times less than the USA! I hope I see this change so I can add even more servers in your region!

...correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd imagine there are a bunch of Australian gamers who simply weren't buying the game because of the ping issue. When we finally get servers Down Under, make sure you show your support for EA's decision and pick up your own copy of the game! (The more copies they sell over here, the more likely they are to put more servers in this country... win win!)


If you're not in Australia, we have some good news for you, too. According to Xbox 360's Major Nelson:

I just heard from EA, and they wanted me to let you know that “Battlefield 1943 has been so well received and in such high demand we exceeded our server capacity. I know many have a hard time getting in, but a lot of people are playing and overwhelmingly love it. Because of this many people at DICE and EA have been working non-stop since the game launched to add more servers so that we meet the demand and keeping our community as up-to-date as possible. Because of these efforts we will have enough servers to meet these player count demands very soon.”

Once they get these last few bugs out the way and sort it out so everybody can play Battlefield 1943, the Coral Sea Community Challenge is due to kick off in the wee hours of Saturday morning, Adelaide time. Starting at 19:43 Central European Time (heh, geddit?), gamers will start working towards racking up 43 million kills as soon as possible, in order to unlock the new Coral Sea map. For those of you playing at home, that's 03:13am Adelaide time, not quite as catchy but still good.

For what it's worth, we hear the PS3 launch of the game went very smoothly...