Developers Respond to Rumors of Aug. 20th Early AccessFollow

Found this on Reddit, thought you would all be interested to see if you haven't already:

(Translation and Credit to Tank Police on the Reddit forums)

A Japanese forum thread has appeared asking about the validity of the English forums' belief that Early Access will be the 20th of August. On the Japanese forums, this is not well-known yet. In reponse, a Japanese developer has made this post:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ARR-Test/threads/89777-%E3%82%A2%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A2%E3%82%AF%E3%82%BB%E3%82%B9%E3%81%AF8%E6%9C%8820%E6%97%A5%E9%96%8B%E5%A7%8B%E3%81%8B?p=1064735&viewfull=1#post1064735

Hello.

This topic has certainly become widespread on the English forums, hasn’t it? This piece of information has developed into something rather complicated, so after this the rep teams for each language will make a response as necessary, but for the time being we have not announced the date for Early Access in any region. In order to prevent confusion, we would like to make this point clear.

The current status is the same as is displayed on this page: http://jp.finalfantasyxiv.com/product/index.html

Early Access
Those who pre-order Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn and register a special early-access code will be able to play FFXIV a few days prior to the official release date!

As is mentioned above.
Until we make a further announcement, please stay tuned.

<Translator’s Note: The Japanese product info page has one specific word of note for when Early Access is : 下旬. This means the last 1/3rd of a month. This may be a case of SE simply wishing to stress that they haven’t made anything official yet, or may be an attempt to refute our current knowledge. Let the speculation commence!>

Thing is we've heard from SE in typical implied manner that Early Access would only be about a week at best and would start a few days after Phase 4 and since Yoshi appeared on a server during beta and gave some info apparently which was posted on a trusted blog for XI/XIV info, P4 would be starting 9th at the earliest, goes down the 17, Early access starts the 20th and flows into Official Launch on the 27th unless they're only releasing the game the 27th and service starts later, which means P4 can easily start anytime between 9-17th and early access still being a few days after P4 going down since we did hear 4 would only be a week which was also posted at that blog and no one can use names of SE dev/community members or even exact replicas of other game character names.

Edited, Jul 24th 2013 9:44am by Theonehio

When it gets advertised for the product, I consider that pretty official.

http://ffxiv.zam.com/forum.html?forum=152&mid=1374174398237274911

See the image linked in LebargeX's post. Even if SE decided to change the length of early access after posting that ad, I would still consider the old information "official" -- it just got "officially" changed later.

I consider the day I physically obtain the product as the official day of release. Even a date advertised as the release date is subject to change.

So in other words Aug 20th...

I think you missed this part. It's in reference to the screen Lebarge posted showing that it specifically says 7 days for early access, straight from SE. Being that release is the 27th, it only makes sense that it would be the 20th. Would seem weird to have early access, then shut everything down before launching...

I'm not trying to argue either. It just seemed like you missed the link in LebargeX's post, because that wasn't a private email on a forum, it was what SE displayed when purchasing the game. It could still be changed obviously, which is probably why their PR guys are covering themselves by saying it's not definitive yet.

By the outright lack of denial, and them circumvating whether or not it was true, it leads me to believe that yes early access would be the 20th. So Im sticking by my prediction that the phase four trial period will be from the 10th through the 17th.

The pre-order bonus page stated plain as day that you get early access 7 days before launch, however it looks like the page has since been changed. With the launch scheduled for August 27th it is fairly simple to figure it out.

After waiting on the sidelines for so long it was exciting to finally be able to know when I will get to play, now it is in up in the air again. No big deal but I don't really have anyting else in regards to FFXIV to talk about.

I would like SE to at least address this part of the confusion but I guess with things not 100% they are just playing things safe.

Okay so I noticed something just now that I did not earlier.

Apparently the image everyone has been referring to with 7 days of early access was rumored to have been Photoshopped by somebody... and this announcement from the devs basically confirms this.

Again I'm just reporting to keep you all as informed as possible, please don't shoot the messenger.

I'm sorry, but that's not a solid conclusion.

I copied this from Reddit... please read... I'm just trying to help the Zam.com community be more informed, remind me not to post anything ever again that people don't want to hear.. talk about shooting the messenger around here. Jeesh.

Edited, Jul 25th 2013 11:37am by Hairspray