Today Square Enix announced that it will be testing travel in Final Fantasy XIV between Data Centers of different regions, with a major caveat.
According to the announcement made on the official Lodestone website, the test will be conducted on Monday, starting on March 24 at 8:00 p.m. PDT, 11:00 p.m. EDT, March 25 at 3:00 a.m, GMT, 4:00 a.m. CET, or 2:00 p.m. AEDT depending on where you live. It'll end when the Dawntrail expansion launches this summer.
The caveat is that only characters from the North American, European, and Japanese Data Centers will be able to travel to the recently created Oceanian Data Center.
This feature is being tested to let players travel to less congested servers to avoid long queue times when the Dawntrail expansion launches. The release of the previous expansions caused heavy congestion on the more populated servers, forcing players to wait a long time to log in.
It's also worth mentioning that characters on the Oceanian Data Center won't be able to go anywhere and they're stuck where they are for now.
Square Enix mentions that the system is capable of handling fully unrestricted travel between regional data centers, but justifies limiting the feature with hesitations due to "substantial differences in market economy and social norms between data centers."
The announcement also promises to "continue to take community feedback into account as Square Enix considers whether this functionality should be enabled."
It was 2019 when producer and director Naoki Yoshida himself told me during an interview (back then I was working for a different site) that the ultimate aim of the World Visit system was to let players travel without restrictions between all the servers, including across regions as the final goal. He even drew a doodle to explain, and you can see it above.
Back then, I was overjoyed to hear this. As a veteran of Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, I have experienced communities that allowed players of all regions to mingle on the same servers, and these communities absolutely benefited from it.
We live in a globalized world, and in 2024 it makes no sense to keep players from different parts of the world forcibly separate. Cultural differences should be embraced and considered an added value instead of a limiting factor.
Of course, differences in the economy are pretty much irrelevant. There are plenty of differences in the economy within the same region and within the same Data Center today, and that has not stopped the implementation of the World Visit and Data Center Visit systems.
So, if you want to be able to travel without anachronistic restrictions and limitations, you may want to provide that community feedback that Square Enix mentioned.
Personally, I still hope to be able to one day go visit the friends I made on Gungnir during the times of 1.0 before Square Enix forcibly split us with the release of 2.0. I'm still sore about that decision and I wonder if any of them still remember me.
Final Fantasy XIV is currently available on PS5, PS4, PC, and Mac. An Xbox Series X|S version is coming this spring and an open beta is already ongoing.
If you're interested in Dawntrail, you can read a lot of recent details from the latest Fan Festival in Tokyo.
Final Fantasy XIV is one of the most beloved MMORPGs in the market and it recently passed 30 million registered accounts. If you'd like to jump on the bandwagon before the expansion hits, you can purchase a copy on Amazon.
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