Final Fantasy XIV Data Center Expansion Plans Detailed

Director/Producer Naoki Yoshida has announced details for the upcoming expansions for the game’s overloaded data centers, as well as the soon-to-be-opened Oceania center, as well as the resumption of new sales of Final Fantasy XIV. Here are the highlights, but the full Lodestone post is here should you want to read it.

1) Oceania Data Center

• The Oceania Data Center will be launching on January 25th, with five Worlds. (The original plan was to launch with three, and add two later, but they adjusted plans in light of demand.)
• Because these will be “New” Worlds, the Home World Transfer fee will be waived for players relocating to them.

2) Resumption of Home World Transfer Service

• The Home World Transfer service will resume on January 26th, the day after the launch of the Oceania Data Center.
• The service will be available to all players, not only ones wishing to relocate to the new Data Center.

3) Details on Data Center Travel System

• Data Center Travel will be implemented in a 6.1x patch. (Meaning, not the actual 6.1 content patch, but in a smaller patch afterwards.)
• Players will be able to visit worlds in the same geographical region. This means that players on the European, Japanese, or Oceanian Data Centers will not be able to visit the North American Data Centers, for example.
• Cross-region travel is being considered for the future, depending on potential impact on game economy.
• Data Center Travel will operate before logging in, rather than from an Aetheryte Crystal in-game. This does mean that the addition of data center travel will not have a high impact on duty queue wait times, as you will still only queue in duty finder with people on the same Data Center as yourself.
• “Compared to the World Visit System we already have in place, the Data Center Travel System will be subject to more restrictions for those functions that are managed per logical data center, such as free company chat and cross-world linkshells.” (We’re not totally sure what this means yet, but our best guess is that you won’t be able to use in-game chat to talk with your Free Company or any linkshells on another data center while using the system.)

4) Expansion of Existing Data Centers

• Japanese Data Centers:
  • As the Japanese Data Centers currently house an excessive number of worlds in each, the system is not currently equipped to handle the expansion necessary to accommodate more spikes in player population. The team is adding an additional Data Center to Japan, but will be redistributing the existing Worlds between the four Data Centers rather than immediately adding new ones. This is estimated to allow for an additional 50,000 players to log in simultaneously, and is scheduled for July 2022.
• North American Data Centers:
  • The expansion of the North American Data Centers is currently scheduled to come in two phases. Phase one is scheduled for August 2022, and will establish a brand-new Data Center in North America with four new Worlds. Phase two will later add four additional worlds.
  • The team is currently discussing another expansion to occur around the release of Patch 7.0. (We imagine that would be around November 2023.)
• European Data Centers:
  • The expansion of the European Data Centers will also be coming in two phases. Phase one is scheduled for July 2022, and will add two new Worlds to each existing Data Center. Phase two is estimated to come in summer 2023, and will add an additional Data Center with eight new Worlds.
  • The European team is looking into physical space for a fourth European Data Center, also to be launched around Patch 7.0

5) Resumption of New Sales

• After consideration by the team of the impact on the existing community, digital sales of Final Fantasy XIV will be resumed on January 25th. This is intended to help populate the new Oceania Data Center, and will hopefully have minor impact on current queue times, as the average peak population has decreased now that players have had the opportunity to complete Endwalker. Should it be deemed necessary, the FFXIV team is prepared to re-suspend sales of the title.

And that’s everything! A lot of it is future news, but it is exciting that we’re already looking that far forward. The next Letter From the Producer Live! will most likely be dropping in the end of February, so hopefully we get concrete information on Patch 6.1 at that time.