My plan was perfect, if a little stereotypical. I had my chips, I had my Mountain Dew, and by gosh, I planned to spend around 15 hours of Sunday on my rear for a Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn marathon as soon as the early access period began. Alas, that didn't happen. Instead, I spent the bulk of that time looking at an error message proclaiming that the world was full and to try again later. And so I tried and tried, but for hours the result remained the same – no queue, no nothing. That's a shame, because I know from previous experience in the beta that once you manage to sneak past that error screen, there's a good game waiting that's infinitely better than its botched 2010 predecessor.

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I bring this up mainly because today marks A Realm Reborn's official release, and there's every possibility that Square Enix's rebuilt MMOPRG could be suffering from Sunday's troubles again as you're reading this. It's important to note that the issues only seemed to affect the North American and European servers; jump over onto the Japanese servers and you would have enjoyed a smooth experience that was more in line with what Square no doubt had in mind.In fact, the Japanese servers were actually rather deserted, even during my 3:00 a.m. central time play session, which roughly corresponds to rush hour in Tokyo. Compare that to my North American server of Excalibur, which was so packed that I felt as though I was waiting for the subway in downtown Chicago at 5:00 p.m. At last I stumbled on a possible reason for all this crowding nonsense: players in A Realm Reborn aren't automatically booted with they've been idle for a while, and indeed, my Roegadyn Archer hasn't been offline since around 6:00 a.m. on Monday morning. (My apologies to my fellow Excaliburians, but I have a game to review.)You may not have any problems depending on your location, but even if you do, the world itself does much to dispel any resentment over the login issues. Square Enix's work here frankly boggles the mind; this has to count as one of the most sincere apologies in gaming history thus far. It's beautiful, especially on the PC, and I admit that I made a character that would spend most of his early levels in the bosky expanses of Gridania just because I'd fallen in love with the forest setting from the beta. It's also surprisingly easy to get around in, as Square's efforts toward intuitive design reveal themselves in aspects as disparate as the UI for both the keyboard and the gamepad, and the ease of finding objects on the map.The story chugs along with generally brief cutscenes for main quests, although a series of chat windows for even the most mundane FedEx or kill-and-fetch missions grants a sense that, yes, we're in a Final Fantasy game, and, yes, this is a living world. If the narrative approach fumbles at all, it's at the very beginning. Forget about quickly getting an idea of what it's like playing as each race and class combo, as you'll need to sit through around 10 minutes of cinematics every time you make a new character. The idea seems to be that you only need one character, since you can technically change your class at any time by switching out your weapon, but it's an infuriating approach when you just want to see if Miqo'tes have better bow animations than Roegadyn.That sounds superficial, but it’s important because A Realm Reborn’s combat remains firmly entrenched in the old-school tab-and-hotkey system, even though the actions are now faster and flashier than they were the first time around. Much as in World of Warcraft, it tends to leave a mediocre impression in the first handful of levels, but comes into its own once your ability bars start to flesh out as you approach the level cap. Take my brief tour of the Japanese servers: I decided to make a Hyur Thaumaturge there, but I quickly realized the class wasn't for me after I leveled from 1 to 5 by literally doing nothing besides standing in one spot and frying ladybugs with the help of my 1 and 2 keys. Whatever its eventual strengths, A Realm Reborn’s combat initially doesn't grant the same surprises as more movement-focused MMORPGs like Guild Wars 2 and TERA.But on the bright side, there's always something to do. Always. The absence of that feeling was long one of the criticisms of vanilla Final Fantasy XIV: once you ventured beyond the initial story quests, it was so open-ended that many players had little to no idea of what to do next. Nowadays it's not uncommon to see around three new quest markers occupying the space of your minimap anywhere in the world. Even better, the world itself is filled with "Fates," random combat events that roughly mirror Guild Wars 2's dynamic events or Rift's titular rifts.That feature adds a welcome dose of constant player cooperation in A Realm Reborn, particularly since combat features a modified form of open tagging, meaning that if you kill an enemy that's already attacking a player outside of your group, you'll still get partial experience and loot for that kill based on your contribution. Adding to the variety are the so-called guildleves, daily quests of sorts that let you adjust the difficulties for greater rewards and focus on tasks such as combat, your tradeskills, your gathering skills, or (later) your Grand Company skills. Many of them, particularly the combat ones, amount to little more than variations on the tired kill X of Y template, but the difficulty choices at least grant them some novelty.Right now, that's my takeaway from Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Sometime this morning I'll have a chance to try out my first few dungeons, and if all goes well, I'll have my first permanent chocobo mount by the end of the day. (You can rent the little guys in FFXIV.) As it stands, A Realm Reborn strikes me as an updated old-school MMORPG, and paradoxically, therein lies some of its appeal. It may show the lessons learned from demands for more dynamic worlds and it may lead you to your next objectives, but it's not so beneficent that it hands you everything without working for it. Some of my favorite moments of my playthrough have had little to do with combat or questing, but rather with the act of helping out players master their trade skills (such as leatherworking) or explaining of rested how XP works. A Realm Reborn wants to remind us that it's okay to talk to each other every now and then, and right now, it's doing a good job of it.Our coverage will continue until we’re ready to issue a final review score, so be sure to check back for more on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.