The Week in Review: Guild Wars 2 Edition

GTA 5 fans looking for more screenshots are out of luck this week. Instead the internet and its dog have been going a little bit mental for subscription free MMO Guild Wars 2. I’ve not seen Twitter lit up with as many posts about one game since… well, probably since the last asset drop for Grand Theft Auto V.

ArenaNet’s highly anticipated MMO started the week with a bang, setting a new record for concurrent users of 400,000 during the early access weekend. Amazingly, during this 72 hour window one player managed to max out a character to level 80. The launch didn’t go quite as planned, though, with overflow server separations causing the development team to work around the clock on a fix. Then came reports of account hacking, forcing NCsoft to warn players to be extra vigilant, and today the game’s digital sales have been suspended to ensure servers can adequately support the already substantial player base.

The chart update came in on Tuesday – we were all off having a lovely Bank Holiday on Monday – revealing that THQ’s Darksiders II failed in its bid to kill off Square’s Sleeping Dogs. The struggling publisher must, however, be fairly pleased with first week sales which are almost twice that of the franchise’s first appearance.

PS3 gamers can be a whiny bunch – much more so than all the lovely Xbox fans – but this week they had every reason to have a moan. Not only is Valve’s Counter-Strike: GO still a no-show on the European PlayStation Store, but Bethesda appears to have serious doubts about ever being able to release Skyrim’s Dawnguard DLC on the console. And to rub salt in to the wound, Bethesda went and announced the September 4 release of Hearthfire for Skyrim on Xbox 360.

PS3 gamers might be getting miffed at some poor treatment, but this doesn’t come close to how pissed the Spec Ops: The Line director is with 2K for forcing in a multiplayer mode as if it were a cancerous growth. Diablo co-creator David Brevik did bring some peace to the week, putting an end to a public argument between himself and the current Diablo team led by Jay Wilson.

After what seems like years of speculation Hideo Kojima finally announced a new Metal Gear Solid. Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes is an open-world stealth game which may be targeting next-generation consoles – a demo was played on a PC. In related news Konami also confirmed that former Marvel man Avi Arad is to produce a Metal Gear Solid movie, which will remain true to Kojima’s vision of a convoluted mess. It has not been confirmed if the film will feature a monkey in silver pants, but I sincerely hope it will.

A console which may not be getting the new Metal Gear is probably the Wii U, which had its innards shared across the internet for all to see. Well, not quite, but developer sources revealed that whilst the CPU is a bit pants, the GPU is pretty decent – at least good enough to surpass the visuals we’re currently accustomed to seeing on Xbox 360 and PS3 anyway. And it would seem Nintendo’s Wii U will only have around a year on the market as top dog, with EA Labels president Frank Gibeau revealing that Xbox 720 and PS4 will be with us in about a year – we can’t wait.

We also had two reviews this week – Martin’s appraisal of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron revealed that High Moon Studios certainly still has the touch when it comes to making action games full of fighting robots, whilst Sam had just as much fun chomping through human flesh in The Walking Dead: Episode 3.

And as always, please give our podcast a listen – it’s usually pretty amusing and this week there’s some chat about Guild Wars 2 and Counter-Strike: GO, amongst other things.

And that’s all for this week. I’m off to sit in front of Sky Sports News in the hope that Spurs manage to sign some good players before the transfer window slams shut at 11pm.