It's a big week for Final Fantasy XIV, with the long-awaited Endwalker expansion launching this weekend in early access and bringing new and returning players back in massive numbers - too many for the MMO to cope with, apparently, which is why Square Enix is giving away a free week of play to everyone struggling to get in right now.
While the official release date of the Endwalker expansion is still a few days away - it properly launches on Tuesday, December 7, in fact - the early access period has already started. As a result, Final Fantasy XIV has smashed all of its concurrent player count records on Steam as everyone heads in to check out the new Endwalker content.
Unfortunately, this popularity has come with a price, as director and producer Naoki Yoshida reports "an extremely large number of players" trying to access the MMO - and as a result, servers have been regularly hitting their login caps, queues have been lengthened dramatically, and there's been "an immense amount of network load which caused Worlds to go down".
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