Offered as a pre-order incentive, the early access program allows advance customers to access the game world and get a head start on their characters a full three days before its North American launch on Tuesday, May 20.

"We knew that a specific number of players would be willing to take the offer and get 3 days earlier access to the game," the company wrote in its forum. "That the registrations would reach that set limit as fast as they did we didn't quite expect."

The developer chalked up the set number of early access slots to the fact that, as the game will not be publicly released until next Tuesday, advance players need to download the entire game client instead of installing it from a DVD.

"The limit was set to make sure that registered players would have the chance to download the client and access the game servers," it added. "With an unlimited amount of players, that would not be possible."