Love gets private servers, PC Gamer to host first

We're delighted to announce that Love , the dreamlike co-op strategy-shooter from Eskil Steenberg, is going to allow private servers - and that PC Gamer will be the first to host them.

It was only last week that Eskil announced his game would be going free. Since then the game has been flooded with new players, putting both the server and the game's mechanics under heavy load.

"After last week I have seen an explosion in new players and interest," says Eskil on the Quel Solaar blog . "It has been absolutely amazing and it has been a massive success and donations are pouring in. But it also made it very clear to me that [...] many of the new players need less players and action, they need a calmer safer environment that doesn't change. To them Love needs to become more stable, and not have me constantly put new experiments in there."

The solution? Let players run their own servers.

"It's been requested many times before, but with very few players it always felt better to have everyone gathered in a few shared servers, but now things are different. The servers are over populated.

"The new servers that you will be able run yourself, will be configurable in various ways so that you can run them with or without AI, you will be able to re-seed when ever you want, you will be able to save several copies of the world, put a password on them, and pause them.... and maybe, just maybe, I will make some options to make Love more punishing. I will still run my own servers that will be accessible to anyone.

"This was not something I planed, so I will need to take some time to work out all the details. I need to redesign a significant part of the master server architecture. [...] It will be a few weeks until I'm able to release the servers publicly, but I'm working as fast as I can to make them ready for public release. Luckily PCGamer has stepped up and will in a few days start running the first beta servers that will allow me to test this. I cant thank them enough for all their support!"

Quite alright, chum. So watch this space. We'll hope to get a server up and running next week.