Unable to connect to Data Center

[JustcallmeSoul]

well... thats something... when i pull up the resource monitor i dont see a .exe for final fantasy, even with the game open and minimized on the play screen. unless of course what im actually looking for is Steam.exe, since im running through steam.

[Nekodar]

well... thats something... when i pull up the resource monitor i dont see a .exe for final fantasy, even with the game open and minimized on the play screen. unless of course what im actually looking for is Steam.exe, since im running through steam.

The exe you're looking for should be ffxiv.exe or something like that. But, I don't run through Steam, so not sure how that works.

Just to be sure... You start the game, get a window where you have to input username, password and possibly OTP... press play there, then get into the main screen where you have to select datacenter?
Or do you get from steam directly to the main screen?

When you install the game through steam, have you tried to start the game through the start "menu" instead of through steam?

[JustcallmeSoul]

ok within the resource manager, when i launch FFXIV i see ffxivboot.exe and ffxivlauncher.exe come up and start sending/receiving packets, after i login and launch the game via the play button on the launcher ffxivboot.exe and ffxivlauncher.exe stop sending packets and fall off the list. nothing containing ffxiv in the name replaces them. so it seems that we have found out something is wrong... welcome to three days ago.

[Nekodar]

I'm not at home right now so can't direct you to which executable to run, but steam should not be necessary at all.
See if you can find the Final Fantasy entry on the start screen somewhere, or search for where the ffxiv.exe file is. Not sure which file exactly needs to be run, but if you find it you can try from there.
Based on your latest post, find ffxivlauncher.exe and run that from outside steam. Can also try right-click and "run as administrator", just in case...

Did you uninstall all anti-malware and other such programs or only disabled?

Won't be able to suggest anything more until later today.

[JustcallmeSoul]

found a resolution and fixed the problem turns out on very rare occasions on select AMD cards there is a problem with the opening movie, by changing CutsceneMovieOpening in the ffxiv.cfg file from 0 to 1 i was able to load the game perfectly fine. took me 3 days to find a 12 second fix.