Final Fantasy 14 is experimenting with cross-region Data Centre travel for the first time in the MMO's history as its upcoming expansion, Dawntrail, looms.
MMOs are no strangers to server congestion, and Final Fantasy 14 is no exception. Matters really came to a head in late 2021 with the release of Endwalker, prompting server queues that stretched on for dozens of hours. Server queues got so bad that Square Enix actually pulled Final Fantasy 14 off sale until things were looking better for the MMO.
Now, Square Enix is being slightly more proactive ahead of Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion later this year. In a new Lodestone blog post today, Square Enix announces that it will experiment with cross-region Data Centre travel during an upcoming testing phase, which will run from March 25 until maintenance to launch patch 7.0 begins.
- Final Fantasy 14 gets its biggest post-Dawntrail patch yet in 7.2 next month, adding a new Savage tier, trials, Phantom Jobs, Cosmic Exploration, and more
- As the Final Fantasy 14 devs "continue to take a firm stance" against mods that can enable harassment, Yoshi-P says improvements are starting in patch 7.2
This effectively means players can hop between Data Centres in different regions. Final Fantasy 14 currently lets players visit other Worlds, but it never lets players switch Data Centres with individual characters. The theory is that this should help with server queues so players can vacate to another if one Data Centre is full.
"We will continue to take community feedback into account as we consider whether this functionality should be enabled," Square Enix writes. "On the other hand, many Worlds may experience login queues following the upcoming release of Dawntrail, especially during peak times. With this situation in mind, we are considering a temporary option in which a limited form of cross-region travel would allow players to play on a less-populated physical data center."
Square Enix warns that if you connect to a far-away Data Centre, you might experience some lag while playing Final Fantasy 14. Clearly, this is still undergoing testing, though, hence why Square Enix is using the period before Dawntrail launches to "identify potential technical issues ahead of Dawntrail's release."
Square Enix first revealed in July 2023 that it could facilitate Final Fantasy 14 players visiting different regional servers, but it didn't know whether it actually should. "Is it okay to just suddenly open the floodgates for everybody to intermingle? I'm afraid we still don't have enough information for us to have the confidence to open that up," game director Naoki Yoshida said at the time.
Right now, Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion still only has a loose release window of summer 2024. Yoshida also recently said that Final Fantasy 14 won't forget the unanswered mysteries of the past 10 years while it plows through its next expansion.
Read up on our new games 2024 guide for a look ahead at all the new titles that Dawntrail could potentially be launching alongside.
