After being literally too popular to handle following the release of the game's Endwalker expansion, Final Fantasy 14 is set to go back on sale on January 25.
In an update post by Naoki Yoshida, the Final Fantasy 14 game director explained that "after due consideration", Square Enix has decided to resume digital sales.
Sales for Final Fantasy 14 were suspended back in December, following the overwhelming popularity of the game's Endwalker expansion. At the time, Yoshida explained that due to the sheer amount of people playing Endwalker, Square Enix had taken the decision to temporarily stop selling Final Fantasy 14 in order to try and combat the long wait times that players who already owned the game were facing.
However, in a lengthy new update, Yoshida explained that plans to resume digital sales for the game come alongside opening a new Oceanian Data Center, which will add five new worlds, and should mean that there is “more than enough room for everyone in Oceania to transfer over”.
The data center's launch will coincide with the restart of digital sales on January 25. According to Yoshida, this change will help players in the region "who have struggled with network latency issues". In addition, Square Enix has also said that it will be providing additional incentives to those who do make the switch over to the new data center, such as waiving the transfer fee to make the change.
Due to the addition of the new data center, Yoshida also confirmed that the developer would be resuming the game's Home World Transfer service, which allows players to move to different worlds, on January 26. Yoshida says that the change will take place the day after the launch of the Oceanian Data Center "to ensure a smooth and stable launch" and that while all players who "wish to change Home Worlds may do so", there will be an exception for "transfers to certain congested worlds".
To further combat the game's congested servers, Square Enix is also planning to expand its Japanese, European, and North American data centers. Japan will receive its new data center in July 2022, which will add a fourth logical data center and increase the game's capacity by 50,000. Meanwhile, Europe and North America will receive a two-phase server expansion, beginning in July 2022, and August 2022 respectively.
Yoshida explained that these changes will hopefully allow the game's servers to steadily return to normal levels. That being said, the director didn't rule out further suspending digital sales in the future should "event servers continue to experience extreme levels of congestion."
For more on Final Fantasy 14, make sure to check out this article detailing how Naoki Yoshida asked for fans to be kinder to developers when giving feedback.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-back-on-sale-january-2022
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