Final Fantasy 14 digital sales will restart later this month after Square Enix took steps to ease the server congestion that has plagued the game over the past few months. These steps include opening new FFXIV servers in Oceania and more data centers to be installed around the world throughout 2022.
How FFXIV congestion is being eased
The Oceanian data center will be opening on January 25 and will start with five new worlds. To encourage players in this region to transfer over to the new servers, the transfer fee will be waived as well as Square Enix offering other incentives, which will be detailed closer to launch. This will also mean the Home World Transfer Service will reopen for all players on January 26. The reason for the day delay for Oceania players is to make sure the new data center is operating without issue.
Other regions will be getting data center expansions. While Japan will not be getting new worlds, they will be getting a new data center to handle some of the extreme congestion currently handled by the current data centers. This change will take place in July. Meanwhile, North America will get a two-phase server expansion that will add a new data center and eight new worlds. The data center and four of those worlds will be added in August, while the remaining four worlds will go live in the spring or summer of 2023.
Europe will be getting the biggest expansion of all, again taking place in two phases. The first phase will add four new worlds in July. The second phase will add a new data center and eight new worlds in summer 2023. Both Europe and North America are likely to be expanded beyond this further into the future and you can find more details on the game’s website.
The promised Data Center Travel System has now been pushed back to a later version 6.1x patch. This would allow players to travel to other worlds stored on the same data center. Cross-region travel may be implemented in the future but won’t be available at launch. Finally, sales of the game will restart at 5pm JST on January 25. If servers continue to experience extreme congestion, sales will be suspended again. After Square Enix is sure the servers are working well, they’ll consider restarting the free trials too.
In other news, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart still has one Easter Egg players haven’t managed to find yet. Elsewhere, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is rumored to be releasing a month earlier than normal due to the poor sales of Call of Duty: Vanguard.
