In the coming days, Final Fantasy 14 will make some long-overdue upgrades to the server equipment in four data centers. The news of the server upgrades was announced by Square Enix on March 20 and coincides with the release of a small content update to Final Fantasy 14 on the day the upgrades will take place.
When Final Fantasy 14 released the Endwalker expansion in December 2021, the game received praise across the board for its storytelling, music, and gameplay thanks to the addition of the Reaper and Sage jobs. However, Endwalker was also marred by login queues and errors due to the sheer number of players that wanted to play the game and experience the main story for themselves. This was due in part to the game's population spike that took place in the summer of 2021, due to an influx of players that came over from World of Warcraft. However, to ensure similar circumstances are better mitigated in the future, some servers will receive updates soon.
Starting on April 3 at 3:00 AM Pacific, a 24-hour maintenance period will take place on the North American data centers. The servers that will be undergoing hardware upgrades are on the Aether, Primal, Crystal, and Dynamis data centers. Square Enix stated that the upgrades will ideally optimize how the game runs on the server architecture and ensure the game will continue to support new features in upcoming content patches and expansions. However, the Final Fantasy 14 development team clarified that the physical location of the North American data centers will not be affected by the server upgrades and that they will remain in their current, California-based locale. Only time will tell what tangible results will come from these upgrades, and how players will be affected in the near future.
Following the hardware upgrades, Final Fantasy 14 servers will be back online on the morning of April 4, which will also coincide with the release of Patch 6.38. The patch will come out just four weeks after Final Fantasy 14 Patch 6.35, which added some new quests and the Eureka Orthos deep dungeon. While the contents of Patch 6.38 are not known at the time of writing, job balance updates and some bug fixes will likely be all that will occur until the release of Patch 6.4 in the coming months.
The next Letter from the Producer Live broadcast will take place next Friday, March 31, and it will likely go over the server upgrades for the North American data centers and what Final Fantasy 14 players can expect in both Patch 6.38 and Patch 6.4. All in all, a busy time awaits Final Fantasy 14 players in the near future.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now for PC, PS4, and PS5.
Source: Square Enix
