UPDATE (7:20 p.m. Pacific Time): Temtem seems much better after a small patch, although when I last attended there was a long line of over 6,000 people and it took about 30 minutes to wait. But after the small patch, Temtem seems to be much better. I have not had any disconnects and have played several battles without the freeze I encountered this morning.

Original story (12:45 p.m. PST): "Pokémon but an MMO on PC" turns out to be an attractive sales pitch: as of this writing, I am the 14,000th in line to connect to Temtem, a monster battle MMO that opened for Early Access today.

Launch.

The queue was quite small right after launch, but it soon became clear why the spots were open. There was one during character creation and two more in the starting town. In addition, when we asked Temtem to use certain abilities, we were stuck in an endless idle animation loop, which had to be force-quit.

MMO startup; MMO startup remained the same.

Hopefully Temtem will stabilize soon. You start by visiting a professor and choosing your first Temtem from three different types, each type being stronger or weaker than the other. For an idea of what to expect, Rachel posted an impression last week. [But in Temtem's case, they all seem to be suffering from the same server disconnects and bugs as I am.

It's a tough situation, but not uncommon for online games to stumble at the starting line. Keep checking back for progress this week.

One caveat if you try Temtem now: if you have an Xbox controller plugged in, the cursor will not appear in the menu. On that note, Temtem can be played with mouse and keyboard, but it is tricky to control with full-tilt WASD.

Early troubles aside, the prospect of pocketing monsters on the PC is clearly intriguing; we'll take a closer look at that zoo once Temtem's server issues and endless battle loops are resolved this week.