At the end of last year, just a week after the official launch of its latest expansion, we saw how Final Fantasy XIV Online faced constant crashes and saturations of its servers around the world, caused by the growing popularity of the title. So much so, that Square Enix had to take various measures to restrict access to new players, even temporarily removing the game from all purchase platforms.
However, during this time the company has been working not only on ensuring the continuity of the current content and upcoming expansion patches, but also seems to have solved its main problem with the servers, announcing the imminent return to sale of all versions. from Final Fantasy XIV.
In the official statement published on The Lodestone, Square Enix’s official blog for this game, producer and director Naoki Yoshida (better known to gamers as Yoshi-P) made a series of announcements, including the date of the resumption of digital sales from Final Fantasy XIV, starting next Tuesday, January 25, 2022 at 9:00 in the morning (peninsula time).
In fact, the resumption of digital sales coincides with the launch of the new Oceania Data Center, with which it is expected to achieve a greater distribution of players to help avoid saturation with the already expected new wave of purchases. And it is that this Data Center will have up to five worlds (or servers) available from the first day to distribute to its players, expanding and reinforcing its initial plan announced during its 2021 Fan Fest.
Since these are new worlds, Yoshida says that Square Enix will not charge the transfer fee for these new servers, which means character transfers to those new worlds will be free. Speaking of server transfers, they have also been off for quite some time and will be back on Wednesday, January 26. When Home World transfers return, they will be available to all players in all data centers, which is great news, although Square Enix could limit transfers to Worlds that are already full.
Along with all these announcements, Yoshida also shared facts about upcoming expansions for data centers in North America, Europe and Japan. All of these expansions will start later in the year and should allow more players to log into each data center with less congestion on individual worlds.
Specifically, the expansion of European servers It will take place in two phases distributed between July 2022 and the summer of 2023. The first phase envisions adding four new worlds divided equally between the two currently existing logical data centers, while future plans are to add another logical data center with an additional eight new worlds.
However, there are still some unknowns outside the company that could affect the development of all these plans. And it is that the still present shortage of semiconductors continues to take its toll on the entire technology sector.
