Final Fantasy 14's development team has warned of long queue times for servers and provided limited workarounds for the upcoming Endwalker expansion's launch.
Earlier today on November 30, the Final Fantasy 14 development team at Square Enix posted a detailed blog post about the "congestion during Endwalker's launch." The post begins by warning players that there'll inevitably be extended queue times to log in to servers during Endwalker's launch period, but there's the reassurance that the dev team actually increased login caps for worlds, letting more people in at once.
The blog post also warns players that if the queue timer doesn't look like it's decreasing when attempting to log in, it's not actually broken, and is still decreasing. Players on the full version of Final Fantasy 14 will be given priority over trial players when trying to log in to a world at maximum capacity, as Square Enix looks to put its paying customers first and foremost.
There's actually a workaround for players waiting to log in to a world at max capacity, however. As the blog post explains, you can open a subcommand menu and select 'Visit Another World Server' while waiting, and here you can actually progress main scenario quests in Final Fantasy 14, so you'll still be able to play Endwalker's main story while temporarily visiting another world.
Next, the post warns that if you encounter "Error 2002" when logging in, the world has unfortunately maxed out, and is taking measures to prevent the server from crashing. The dev team asks players to "wait a while" before trying to log in to Final Fantasy 14 again, should they find this error message.
Finally, Endwalker's new areas will actually be "Instanced" to avoid huge player numbers. If you're unfamiliar with the term, it means there'll be different versions of the same location in the same world, so for example there might be multiple versions of Endwalker's Garlemald within the same world. Although this will cut down drastically on player numbers, it does mean players that would normally be able to interact with each other in the same world might not be able to, however.
Final Fantasy 14's climactic Endwalker expansion goes into early access later this week on December 3, before the full launch arrives a few days later on December 7. It's clear from this blog post that Square Enix expects massive strain on the game's servers throughout the launch period, and is a general warning that things might get a little prolonged over the coming few weeks.
Check out our extended Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker preview for impressions of three new areas and one new Dungeon.
