Metal Gear Online delayed

After a weekend of technical woes following the release of Konami’s Metal Online Beta on Sony’s PlayStation Network, the publisher has officially taken its servers offline until it figures out a way to cope with the huge traffic heading towards them.

The beta appeared on PS3’s PSN for download on Thursday, with the game scheduled to come to life last night at 11:00pm.

However, many gamers have reported significant troubles getting the game installed and ready to go. Firstly, once downloaded the game required the additional download of an update – but the peer-to-peer system offered left many waiting several hours for the update.

In addition, access to the game required users to sign up for two ID’s via Konami’s website – and further technical problems meant that even by launch hour last night many gamers had not been able to complete the registration process.

Following the failure for the game to spark to life last night, a statement on Konami’s website appeared this morning saying:

We would like to thank all players for their keen interest in taking part in the beta test. However, we regret to inform you that due to extraordinary levels of traffic from all around the globe, we have been unable to run the service to the level we expected.

As a temporary measure, we will be suspending the US and European public beta test and restart it once we stabilize our server. We would like to apologize for all inconveniences as well as confusion caused.

We would like to add that due to the above reasons, we will be making the following changes to the schedule:
1) Suspend beta test: As of 21/04/2008 08:00(CEST)
2) Restart date: TBA. We will be making another announcement on 22/04/2008 08:00(CEST)
3) Beta Test closure: This will now be on 11/05/2008 at 24:00(CEST) rather than 06/05/2008 at 24:00(CEST).”