Final Fantasy XIV has become a victim of its own success. Before the recent relaunch, I'd rank that high among the list of sentences I never thought I'd type. But now, a day after the release of the A Realm Reborn overhaul, Square Enix have stopped digital sales of the game in order to lighten the overload currently being experienced throughout its servers.

"Due to the overwhelmingly positive response to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, we are currently experiencing extremely long wait times for users to be able to log in and play," announces the Square Enix Facebook page. "As a temporary measure, we will halt sales of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s digital download products so we can accommodate all of those wishing to play."

Square Enix say they are in the process of expanding server capacity, and should be ready to start waving new players inside "in the coming days".

"We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this causes," the statement ends.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

Attention PC gaming vanguards! If you're coming to this weekend's PAX Prime in Seattle, join us in our quest to shine the biggest, brightest spotlight on our beloved hobby. We're putting on two panels, starting with The PC Gaming World Congress on Friday (don't miss the chance to see Dean "Rocket" Hall and Chris Roberts talk shop), and chatting with readers all weekend.

Keep an eye out for Evan Lahti and Tyler Wilde at the show, and watch PC Gamer US on Twitter for updates on Saturday meetup plans—the current plan is to get together at 8:00 p.m. on the second floor of the convention center (near room 206) and go from there. We hope to see you!

And if you can't make it to PAX, just drop by the site for all our coverage, and hold tight for panel recaps.

Friday — The PC Gaming World Congress
6:30 p.m. @ Pegasus Theater (Sheraton Hotel, 2nd floor)

We've assembled a dream team of PC gaming personalities to debate the state of our dear hobby: Dean Hall (Creator, DayZ, Bohemia Interactive), Jon Mavor (Co-Founder, Uber Entertainment), Chris Taylor (Founder, Gas Powered Games), and Chris Roberts (Founder, Cloud Imperium Games).

For an hour, we’ll invite our esteemed speakers to reflect on the issues that matter most to PC gamers and developers and paint a picture of what the next few years in PC gaming will look like. Finally, a congress worth listening to!

Saturday — PC Gamer and GamesRadar meetup
8:00 p.m. @ convention center, 2nd floor near room 206

Come hang out with us! Evan and Tyler will join GamesRadar's Greg Henninger, Ryan Taljonick, Hollander Cooper, and Thomas Darnell—as well as any surprise guests we can talk into coming along—for a casual get-together with readers. We'll gather at 8 p.m. Saturday night on the second floor of the convention center and see where the night takes us from there. We waive all liability if you wake up in Canada.

Monday — Catfantastic Live: A Wholly Insane PC Gaming Trivia Show
1:00 p.m. @ Serpent Theater (Sheraton Hotel, 3rd floor)

Did you hear a meow? It must be…Catfantastic! It’s only the greatest PC gaming trivia show on the planet, where the points matter more than life itself. Join chaotic-neutral host Tyler Wilde as he grills PC Gamer’s Evan Lahti, GamesRadar’s Hollander Cooper and Ryan Taljonick, and audience volunteers with obscure, bizarre, and shamelessly unfair trivia from PC gaming past and present.

Randomly selected audience members will be invited to participate for fabulous prizes, but you’re free to just watch, too. If you’re not familiar with Catfantastic, PC Gamer US Podcast 350 will introduce you to the madness. Be ready!

The newly announced Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior expansion for Chivalry: Medieval Combat will be featured at PAX this weekend. Lucky attendees will see the first two announced historical warriors, the Greek Spartan and the Japanese Samurai.

"We are very excited to expand upon the foundation of Chivalry and bring dynamic melee combat to all new eras. For us it is an opportunity to explore completely new warrior types, environments and weapons and add them to the already expansive Chivalry content while still supporting the base game," Torn Banner Studios President Steve Piggott wrote in a press release.

The expansion will add some new game modes like Faction Battle, where only one warrior type per team is allowed; Warrior Duel, featuring one-on-one combat; Free for All and others. Modes can also be customized to add more teams, capture the flag goals, and no-respawn elimination challenges.

We’ve had a good time with Chivalry, and it’s good to see the competition between rival first-person-slasher War of the Roses heating up and taking us in unexpected directions. The Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior expansion will come out this Fall for $15. If you’re going to be in Seattle this weekend, stop by booth #3636 to get a look.

Good news, Metro fans! According to Deep Silver CEO Dr. Klemens Kundratitz, more Metro games are planned beyond this year’s Metro: Last Light. Speaking to Joystiq at Gamescom last week, Kundratitz refused to officially announce a Last Light sequel, but emphasized that the franchise would have more entries eventually.

"I’m very glad we acquired that brand," Kundratitz said, referring to Deep Silver’s purchase of Metro from THQ during that troubled publisher’s asset auction earlier this year. "While it launched in a very dry space in the gaming calendar this year, it still got a lot of attention."

Kundratitz also said that future games would be made “more accessible to a broader gaming audience," but insisted that Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of Metro 2033, still holds the license and has some say in the creative process. Any changes to broaden the audience for future Metro games will have continue to be approved by Glukhovsky.

We enjoyed Metro: Last Light, so we’re happy to see that more Metro games will probably be heading our way in the near-ish future. Now begins the long, long wait.

Thanks, Joystiq.

A glorious looking new indie platformer, Hot Tin Roof: The Cat that Wore a Fedora, has just announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund the final stages of production. Set in a stylish film-noir world, Hot Tin Roof features a kitty investigator sidekick and a ton of style.



Investigator Emma Jones and partner Franky the cat wander through a 3D sidescrolling city checking into a string of brutal murders. There’s platforming and puzzle solving, as well as people to talk to and mysteries to solve.

As stylish as the world is, the most intriguing thing is the use of your trusty private investigator revolver as a puzzle-solving toolbox straight out of the original Thief games. Different cartridge types allow your trusty sidearm to shoot grappling hooks, fireworks and solid slugs, so you can chamber a few different loads and shoot them in sequence to get yourself out of trouble.



Unlike a lot of Kickstarter projects, Hot Tin Roof is already almost complete and just looking for a little extra to fund the last stages of production. The modest $20,000 goal is already 25% funded as of this writing, so there’s every reason to think this case will come sauntering through our doors sometime soon.

Hot Tin Roof is also on Steam Greenlight. Check out the Kickstarter page for more details.

About five minutes into the demo for The Wolf Among Us, the hero tumbled out of a second story window and smashed onto the top of a taxi. While that sort of fall might have killed a normal man, the sheriff of Fabletown is no normal man. In fact, he's no man at all: He's Bigby Wolf, otherwise known as the Big Bad Wolf, otherwise known as the guy that blew down the Little Pig's Houses and ate Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. He's the hero of Telltale's next series, which looks to mix the story-driven gameplay the developer is known for with violent action.

Set in New York during the 1980s (an exact year wasn't given, but it was clarified that this was "pre-Giuliani" New York), the adventure game serves as a prequel to the Eisner Award-winning Fables comic series. While you won't need to know about the comics to understand the plot, you'll likely go in with more knowledge than you'd expect. Characters like Snow White, Mr. Toad, and the Three Little Pigs occupy the hidden community of Fabletown, and while you might not know too much about the marital problems that face Beauty and the Beast, you'll still know that it makes sense to keep your mouth shut when Beast asks if you've seen Beauty (who Bigby caught sneaking out in the night).



But it all comes back to Bigby, the reformed villain who makes his living as the sheriff of Fabletown. This is a difficult task, considering its inhabitants include the likes of Blue Beard and the Woodsman that originally sliced open his belly and filled it with rocks during that embarrassing Red Riding Hood ordeal.

The opening of the game actually pits him against said Woodsman, who was roughing up a prostitute when Bigby arrived. When he wouldn't listen to reason, the Big Bad Wolf was forced to live up to his name by fighting back. Fans of The Walking Dead likely remember the few instances of action in Telltale's last series, and should be happy to know that it appears that the combat system has been totally revamped for The Wolf Among Us.

It's still based mostly on quick-time-events, but there's much more freedom. Bigby was able to toss the Woodsman around the room as he see fit, bashing him with bottles and hitting him against furniture. It was surprisingly graphic, and looked exceptionally bloody when set against the vibrant neon colors of the stylized '80s world. Their fight continued even after the fall out of the window, only ending when the woman Bigby was protecting saved him with a well-placed axe to the Woodsman's head. He offered to help her, but she declined, saying that she'd meet him at his apartment later in the night.



When Bigby returned to his apartment he found that Colin, one of the Three Little Pigs, was crashing on his couch. After some guilt tripping (mostly about the whole blowing down the house thing) he drifted asleep, only to be woken up by an alarming discovery: the woman that was supposed to meet him was dead. The news was delivered by a very startled Snow White, who needed his help to track down the killer. After some investigating they discovered her identity and went about trying to find out who might have wanted her dead.

It's obviously a much different story than The Walking Dead was, but from the looks of things it will attempt to tell it in a similar manner, focusing on choice and allowing players to play it in any way they see fit. The five-episode series is due out later this year, launching in the early winter for $5 a pop.

Arma 3 is a game with a vast landscape. Its Altis launch map is 270 square kilometers, giving players in the military sim a worthy sandbox to explore and make their own. But how does the map compare to other well-known game worlds, both big and small? Bohemia Interactive game designer Karel Mořický has assembled a handy guide to try and do just that.

What Mořický's comparison show us is that Altis, at least in terms of its sheer virtual size, stands alone. Even when the island map is set alongside iconic spaces like Battlefield 3's Caspian Border, Skyrim's frozen continent, or Grand Theft Auto 4's Liberty City, Altis dwarfs them all.

"It’s so large that most people have trouble understanding such scale in a video game," wrote Mořický on his blog. "The surface area value is not really descriptive, and even comparing it to our previous maps (e.g., 1.5x larger than Chernarus) really explains nothing if you never played our games before."

Mořický's illustration contains exact comparisons to the dimensions of maps from previous Arma games, but relies on published estimates to see how Altis looks next to a landmass like Far Cry 3's Rook Islands, for example. He also points out that when you take into account the playable water and underwater environments on Altis, there are actually almost 1,000 square kilometers to navigate on the map. Naturally it's what we can do and accomplish in all that vastness that will make the difference when Arma 3 leaves beta and officially launches on September 12, but it's great to have a way to wrap your head around just how big a space we'll have to mod, navigate, or stage the next zombie apocalypse.

Super Adventure Box was one of the more ambitious pranks of this year's Make Up Some News Day; mostly because it was real. For the month of April, Guild Wars 2 got an 8-bit console downgrade courtesy of a) Asuran technological experimentation, and b) a game lore flexible enough that its developers can go, "ah screw it, let's just make a platformer".

Now the game's retro device is being fired back up for a new session. Super Adventure Box: Back to School kicks off next week, celebrating children's return to enforced knowledge gathering with a series of pixellated jumping puzzles. No, I don't get the connection. Yes, I'm going to go with it.

The update adds a new World 2 realm, filled with more not-at-all-frustrating jumps, leaps and massive drops into oblivion. Both worlds will also get Tribulation Mode, a harder difficulty version, described as "ridiculously challenging" by the game's update page.

Non-themed improvements and upgrades are also scheduled - and this time, they're fairly significant changes. The level cap for Weaponsmith, Artificer, and Huntsman crafting is being increased to 500, with new recipes allowing players to craft Ascended weapons. In response, Legendary weapons will be given new functionality - allowing owners to choose between different stat bonuses while out of combat.

Magic Find is also being overhauled, so it will no longer be available as an equipment bonus. Instead, an account-wide bonus will be applied, that can be boosted with new items - Essences of Luck - which will be available through salvaging Fine and Masterwork items. So there might actually be a point in doing that, finally.

Super Adventure Box: Back to School will go live September 3rd.

World of Tanks is one of the most popular free to play games in the world for a few reasons. It's got tanks in it, sure, that goes a long way, but it also walks a perfect line between accessibility and complexity. The interface may be friendly and easy to jump into, but after a few hours you come to realise that there's tremendous strategic depth to WoT's team battles. In a matter of a few years World of Tanks has spawned a fierce esports community, ensnared millions of players around the world and grown to include dozens of new tanks, maps and game modes.

Whether you're just starting out with World of Tanks or consider yourself a veteran, you'll find plenty of insider info, guides, interviews, competitions and giveaways in our massive 148 page iDevice guide to World of Tanks. We've taken apart every map, analysed every tech tree, driven every tank, modded them, painted them and driven them off cliffs to provide a comprehensive go-to compendium of tanky knowledge for newcomers and seasoned generals alike. The digimag also comes with £16 worth of free stuff including 1500 gold for existing accounts and - for newcomers - seven days of premium account access, 250 gold an extra garage slot and a Mk VII premium tank to park in it.

We've recently updated these codes to work in any territory. Whether you're a new or existing owner of the magazine, you can secure a new worldwide code by emailing proof of purchase to pcgamer.giftageddon@futurenet.com. Please allow up to 72 hours for a response.

This offer will expire on September 10th.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD TO YOUR IPAD OR IPHONE



Goodies

1500 gold for existing players
For new players, 250 gold seven days of premium account access, a Mk VII tank and an extra garage slot


Tactics

a comprehensive beginner's guide for new tank generals
Every nation's tank tech tree explained and analysed
Our pick of the ten best light, medium and heavy tanks, tank destroyers and self propelled guns
A focused look at the iconic Sherman, Tiger 2 and Maus tanks.
World of Tanks DIY! A look at the best WoT mods out there.
Insightful guides to each of World of Tank's 34 maps


Features

The ten page story of the Wargaming's 15 year battle to build a free-to-play empire.
Interviews with top WoT developers
An inside look at Wargaming's new card game Word of Tanks: Generals
Flying loops in Wargaming's next free to play game, World of Warplanes
An early look at WoT's boaty brother, World of Warships.


History

We take a look at the great tank battles of old, including Kursk, Villers-Bocage, Battle of the Bulge and El Alamein.
Tank history - a look at the origins of the tank, and its development through the ages.


Community

World of Tanks has a thriving e-sports scene
We showcase the best fan art from passionate World of Tank players
Some fans have a flair for creating custom tank skins for their war machines, we talk round up our favourites
Clan Talk - war stories from WoT's top clans
And much more...


Tempted? Print copies are now sold out, but you can still download The Ultimate Guide to World of Tanks for your iThing! Click here to download straight to your iPad or iPhone.