Final Fantasy 14's expansions, uh, tend to break a little when they first launch. It's not an ideal situation, but it's fairly par for the course when it comes to launches of this scale: The solution is almost never 'just buy more servers', rather, it's often a cat's cradle nightmare of tangled systems.
Game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) says his team has braced for impact at a recent PAX talk, but that's an impact in late June/early July. Turns out, Dawntrail's having server issues right now. Its online store is, well, a little on fire. Failed card payments, broken buttons, 404 codes, the works.
Even the Steam version of the game was having trouble. One particularly worrisome consequence is that pre-order bonus codes—which you can use to get a fancy EXP-boosting earring and a minion—have been taking a while to pop up in people's inboxes: "Rest assured, codes are being delivered sequentially, but the email may take up to several hours to arrive due to the high volume of orders."
In other words, that's a server queue. Like the one Endwalker players experienced back when trying to log in to the game back in 2021, just, y'know, months before the game's even out. While the physical collector's edition is one thing (and I'm certain it doesn't help) the baffling thing is that there's otherwise no FOMO here.
Dawntrail has an early access on June 28 for players who pre-order, but as long as you remember to buy the thing over the next three-to-four months, you're golden. Players are primarily just flooding Square Enix's (admittedly archaic) website because they're really excited about a 30% EXP boost earring, I guess.
I, for one, am content to watch as my fellow players create their own digital Black Friday calamity. I'm gonna play Dawntrail for sure, but I don't need an earring that bad. If you also aren't getting the physical collector's edition, I'd urge you to wait too—for both Square Enix's sake and yours. Your wind-up Zidane will be there when the dust has cleared, I promise.
