Giant Interactive’s Long Journey 2S Beta Breaks 500,000 Players Online At Once

The Long Journey series has been one of China’s most popular MMORPGs for some time. The most recent game, Long Journey 2 has been no exception, and now an updated version of Giant Interactive’s (NYSE:GA) popular game seems poised to continue the tradition.

The updated version, which is called Long Journey 2S, has been in public beta for just one week, but on the evening of the twentieth, more than 530,000 players were online at once, according to Giant Interactive representatives. Interestingly, this breaks Giant’s previous record for players online at once, which was set last year by Long Journey 2 at 430,000 players at once.

Long Journey 2S, as they name they seem to have stolen from Apple implies, is not a true sequel but rather an updated version of the popular Long Journey 2. It went into open beta on April 13 with servers in Tokyo, Taipei, and New York as well as across China. As it is an update rather than a full-on sequel, longtime players of Long Journey 2 will be allowed to upgrade for free.

Long Journey 2S and its predecessors are popular in part because they fit well with the habits of Chinese gamers. In China, internet connection speeds aren’t particularly fast and many PC gamers have computers with older components that can’t run the most graphically intensive games. Long Journey 2S offers a huge world to explore, hundreds of thousands of other players, and makes all of that accessible via a user client that’s only 50 MB and won’t melt your graphics card, no matter how old it is.

[via Sina Tech]