Guild Wars 2's pre-orders have apparently been doing pretty well, even at this early stage. While developer ArenaNet and publisher NCsoft have not announced specific sales figures, a recent update on ArenaNet's website gives us a clue as to the popularity of this long awaited fantasy MMO sequel.
In the update, ArenaNet's Mike O'Brien stated that the first Guild Wars 2 beta event, held a couple of weekends ago, had "hundreds of thousands of players" participating. The only way they could actually join the beta was to pre-order the game. Indeed, O'Brien said:
I think it’s safe to say that the response was overwhelming in more ways than one. Firstly, the number of people who pre-purchased the game far exceeded our expectations, and we had to temporarily disable pre-purchases. In the end that wasn’t enough, and even with 48 worlds we didn’t have enough server capacity to meet the huge demand.
ArenaNet will next host a Guild Wars 2 stress test on Monday for all of the game's pre-order customers. The event will be held for seven hours, from 2 PM to 9 PM EDT. O'Brien adds, "The good news is that we’re not wiping characters for this test; we’re using the same build that we used in the first Beta Weekend Event, so you’ll be able to pick up right where you left off."
So far, neither ArenaNet nor NCsoft have offered a release date for the final version of Guild Wars 2, although it is expected to launch later in 2012.
Image via NCsoft
