It's a big week for 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 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 caps, queues have been lengthened dramatically, and there's been "an immense amount of network load which caused Worlds to go down".
Constantly, with all the congestion players have been struggling to access Final Fantasy XIV or the early access content they'd pre-ordered Endwalker especially to get, with the "error 2002" problem a particularly common issue. Yoshida has apologised for these problems and confirmed that anyone with the full game and an active subscription will get seven days of free game time – with the possibility of more being granted "depending on further developments on the congestion situation".
There's the new Overwatch-like PvP mode – so hopefully these issues will get sorted out soon and players will actually be able to get into the game to check them out.