The first day of FFXIV: Heavensward early access has ended, and surprisingly the early access launch was relatively stable, bar one or two issues.

The stability of the expansion of Square Enix’s MMORPG was a welcome surprise as most MMORPG launches or expansions have some major day one issues. For example, World of Warcraft’s latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor had a disastrous launch with the company facing a DDoS attack, and the game not being able to handle the large number of players in various locations for several days. Warlords of Draenor’s launch was so bad that the game’s developers, Blizzard, felt it necessary to give all players five days of free subscription time.

Now back to Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward. The first day of early access had two major issues, Data center crashes and load times in one of the new expansion areas. The game suffered from two data center crashes (this means all world servers going down, this effected PC and PSN users) – the servers crashed the morning early access launched and again at nighttime. Both these crashes didn’t take the game down for long as Square Enix brought the severs back up within 1-2 hours (it might have been even quicker, but I didn’t have stopwatch handy).

The second and final issue was with one of the new level 50 zones, Coerthas Western Highlands. This zone had some severe congestion problems with NPCs taking a long time to load, people getting disconnected, and people being unable to teleport to the zone. Although, the expansions other level 50 zone, The Sea of Clouds, didn’t have the same issues, as the only issue I could see in the clouds were NPCs taking a few seconds longer to appear. However, by the end of the first day, the Western Highlands did stabilized and many of the above-mentioned issues disappeared or became less noticeable.

What led to a relatively good launch by Square Enix wasn’t dumb luck as FFXIV’s developers were well aware that there would most likely be issues. Therefore, to make everything as smooth as possible they introduced field instancing as a form of congestion prevention. This meant that there would be multiple copies of various zones – when one copy filled up new players would be moved to the next free copy. This idea proved to be useful, but unfortunately, Square Enix decided to only implement field instancing on high population worlds/servers.

As the second day of the early access begins, it will be interesting to see how the servers hold up, and if the above-mentioned problems will resurface when Heavensward officially launches on June 23rd.

If you haven’t noticed I am currently taking part in the Heavensward Early Access, and I am enjoying myself. I managed to turn character into a female Au-Ra and get my main job (Black Mage) to level 53 (I am the character in this articles top image). If play Final Fantasy XIV you can find me on the Cerberus under the name Melesa Alees.