It’s now Saturday. The floodgates have opened, and our login servers are starting to grind their gears in earnest — the PS4 beta has begun!

For those of you that have not yet found your way into the realm of Eorzea, this is for you. If you haven’t download the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn PS4 beta, just jump into PlayStation Store now.

First Steps

After you’ve logged in and updated the game, you can go straight to the character creation process. This is really straightforward — choose whatever suits you best! From hulking Roegadyn to tiny Lalafell, all is available to you.

But an important note: if you want to play with friends, you’ll want to make sure that you choose classes that start in the same city! It’s a long trip from city to city, until you do the quest to access a new travel method at level 15.

While you work yourself through the introduction, you’ll be in an instance (a sealed-off area in the game) that only you are in. That’s normal — as soon as you’ve finished the first few quests, you’ll find yourself among tons of other players.

The game will introduce the controls to you, and they shouldn’t take long to learn. While you’re on your own, play around with the controls as much as you like and get acquainted with them. Remember that you can use the PS4 touchpad like a mouse pointer, in case an open window bothers you.

As a general rule, try to follow the quests. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is very story focused, and the quests will lead you through the world.

How to Find Your Friends

In the lower left corner, you can find the chat window. And through the Start Menu, you can find and invite old or new friends to your group.

Chatting and Chat Commands

You’ll see chat in many different colors. White text shows people using /say — only people in close vicinity can read this. Yellow chat is someone using /yell, which reaches much farther. Finally, there’s /shout in red, which everyone on the map will see. There are other modes as well, which you will discover as you play the game and join Free Companies or Linkshells.

And don’t forget: chat commands always start with a “/” in front.

Of course, you can also use emotes, either through the menu or by typing them in. /dance is always very popular.

Changing Classes

At level 10, you’ll be able to do a quest that allows you to change your class however you wish. To unlock new classes, you’ll need to do an introductory quest for the guild offering the class. Since a lot of guilds are located in other cities, you’ll want to wait until you gain access to a travel method connecting the cities at level 15.

This should be all you need to get started!

Enjoy exploring the realm of Eorzea. And thanks for helping us polish the game for its release on April 14th.