In a February blog post, Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy XIV players on Steam will finally be able to link their accounts to the MMORPG. In March, players launching XIV on Steam for the first time would be prompted to upgrade to a new launcher, which would then become the default. If you play on Steam, you must launch FFXIV through the appropriate launcher. After recent maintenance, this update has now gone into effect, and…it’s a complete disaster.
A large portion of Steam users are finding it completely impossible to log into the game, with many being met with a “technical error” message with no error code to speak of. Square Enix immediately addressed the issue in a blog post, claiming that they are investigating the issue.
A short while ago, a follow-up blog post was posted to the Final Fantasy XIV website.
“We are still investigating the issue, but have confirmed that this issue can be avoided by setting your Steam profile name to alphabetical characters only,” the post reads. “We apologize for the inconvenience, but as a temporary workaround, please temporarily change your Steam profile name to only alphabetical characters and attempt launching the game. After the game launches normally without any errors, enter your Square Enix account to link your account.”
It’s worth noting that Square Enix calls this a ‘temporary’ way to get around the FFXIV Steam error. It doesn’t mention if people will be able to change their profile name back to what it was previously after launching the game, getting in, and linking to a Square Enix account. As such, until an additional hotfix is announced, it might be best to stick with an alphabetical Steam profile name.
Final Fantasy XIV is available to play on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. During the most recent Letter from the Producer Live broadcast, producer and director Naoki Yoshida detailed what players can expect from patch 6.1, scheduled to release in mid-April. This includes new story quests, role quests, tribal quests, the new Myths of the Realm alliance raid, and plenty more.
