After a rough launch, Final Fantasy XIV sales are restarting on January 25th. As player numbers return to normal, Square Enix is also expanding its servers, adding new ones and widening the scope of some existing worlds in order to accommodate more players.
Why were Final Fantasy XIV sales suspended?
Back in mid-December, Square Enix suspended digital Final Fantasy XIV sales due to login queue congestion. So many players were trying to log in to check out the new Endwalker expansion that queues were reaching the thousands; in many cases, queues of 6000 or more players were observed. Now that many players have finished the expansion's main story, though, it looks like player numbers are returning to normal, and Square Enix feels confident selling the game again.
Over on the official Lodestone Final Fantasy XIV news page, producer Naoki Yoshida set out his plans to address congestion and return Final Fantasy XIV to sale. There's a lot of technical detail in Yoshida's post, but suffice it to say the Japanese, European, and North American data centers for XIV are getting major expansions, with new worlds being added to North America and Europe. In addition, there's also a new Oceanian data center opening up. Prior to this center's existence, players in Oceania had to play on Japanese servers, but now they'll have their own dedicated data center.
The Oceanian data center is scheduled to open on January 25th, alongside the resumption of digital sales. A day after that, the Final Fantasy XIV Home World Transfer service will also restart, allowing you to move home worlds again. Yoshida says the team is waiting until a day after sales resume in order to make sure everything goes smoothly. This won't just be available to those transferring to Oceania; it'll be widely available to everyone, although you still won't be able to transfer to certain worlds due to ongoing congestion.
Endwalker has been a huge success for Final Fantasy XIV
The congestion necessitating these changes came about due to the launch of newest expansion Endwalker on December 7th (or December 3rd if you pre-ordered the game). Unprecedented numbers of players flocked to XIV to see what all the fuss was about. Unfortunately, Square Enix's servers were ill-equipped to handle this influx, leading to congestion and to many players encountering errors that kicked them out of lengthy login queues.
Despite these issues, Final Fantasy XIV is still receiving regular content updates. Earlier this month, patch 6.05 landed, bringing with it a new Savage version of the Pandaemonium raid, as well as a brand new treasure dungeon in the form of the Excitatron 6000. The next major upcoming patch for Final Fantasy XIV is 6.1, and while we don't have a concrete release date for it yet, we're expecting it to land sometime in March. It'll likely bring with it the first new story content since Endwalker's conclusion, as well as the first part of the upcoming Myths of the Realm 24-man Alliance Raid. We'll have more for you on that as soon as we get it.
Are you planning to buy Final Fantasy XIV now the chaos has died down a little? Let us know in the comments below!
