Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood Early Access Issues See Some Players Locked Out of Characters

This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.

Update: Square Enix has updated players with the status of the second major bug mentioned in this article. The issue seems to be related to those who zone into the Susanoo fight while doing an emote.

"We have confirmed an issue wherein if "The Pool of Tribute" is completed while progressing in the main story quest "The Lord of the Revel", an error may be displayed when returning from the content, and users will be unable to log in again," said Square Enix in its statement. "Our investigation thus far has revealed that this issue occurs when entering "The Pool of Tribute" while performing an emote action. Due to this, we ask that users please finish their emote actions before entering "The Pool of Tribute"."

"It has been confirmed that user will be able to log in again by forcefully changing the area in which their character logged out, so we will be doing this as a temporary means of addressing the issue until it is resolved."

There is still no timing of a better fix for the issue.

Original article: This Friday marked the beginning of the Early Access period for Final Fantasy XIV's Stormblood expansion, which ends with the full launch on June 20, 2017. The issue is that the increase in players during Early Access is causing the game's instance servers to have a bit of a headache. This means that certain quests and dungeons that require the instance servers are preventing players from moving forward with the game's main story and in some cases, locking them out of characters completely.

The main problem that most players are running into involves the main scenario quest, "Best Served with Cold Steel", which you'll run into an hour or so into an average playtime. The quest requires the player to meet with an NPC named Raubahn in The Fringes, who kicks off a cutscene and then an instanced battle. With the server problems, many players are finding that after the cutscene, they're kicked back out to the region they started in, unable to move forward in the story.

Compounding that problem, there's another instanced main story quest a short time later. The same issue can happen there as well. Players can still do other content, but are unable to progress in the game's primary story. The issue extends to the game's Duty Finder, which sends players to other instanced content.

Final Fantasy XIV producer Naoki Yoshida addressed the issues in a message on the FFXIV Lodestone site today.

"I would like to explain the current congestion issue regarding instanced battle content, including the Stormblood main scenario quest 'Best Served with Cold Steel,' due to the Duty Finder crashes at the start of early access," wrote Yoshida. "As announced earlier, there are a huge number of players currently playing Stormblood, and as a result, the servers continue to experience a large amount of stress. For this reason, we are currently limiting the number of players that can enter instanced content so that it does not lead to major server crashes. "

"However, this has caused massive congestion to enter instanced content and I would like to sincerely apologize for this," he added. "We continue to work on measures to address this issue and will follow up once we have an update."

"Currently, the development team is making detailed adjustments by adjusting the speed at which players are transferred to instances on each World so that areas no longer continue to go down and to ensure that all players can continue to play as comfortably as possible," Yoshida said in a following update.

The other issue that's popped up involves instance servers as well, but with much harsher consequences. Players who have tried out the Susanoo Primal fight have disconnected or left the instance only to find themselves unable to log back into their characters at all. The error has affected a number of players on the official FFXIV forums.

Earlier today, community representative Chenin "Luxpheras" Matthews answered the many posts with an official statement.

"Thank you for reporting this concern. We understand that it's incredibly frustrating to be unable to access your characters during Early Access, and deeply apologize for this inconvenience," the representative said. "We have confirmed this issue with the development team, and they are putting high priority on continuing to investigate how to resolve this for players."

"At this time, it seems that the situation will require a resolution via the client itself (through updating the version). As such, we expect it to take more than several days to resolve this issue, including the time required to create the patch. However, because this error is not caused by the corruption of local data or due to a PC issue, it is likely that re-installing the game will not resolve this issue.Again, we deeply apologize for the inconvenience. We'd also like to note that if you continue to attempt to log into the game there is a chance you may be able to log in, so please try again after some time has passed."

There's currently no word on when the fix will get patched into the game. It could likely be after the official launch of the game, leaving some players without much of their Early Access time.

All in all, Stormblood is having a bit of a rough start compared to the smoother launch of Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward.