Final Fantasy XIV Delays North American Server Expansion
| Tags: FFXIV
| Author Timo Reinecke
Due to the shortage of Semiconductors, the planned expansion of the North American Datacenter has been delayed. Here are all the details.
The North American Datacenter Expansion has been delayed to November 2022
Originally, the plan was to implement a whole new Datacenter to Final Fantasy XIV's North American servers by August this year. This was supposed to be the first big step in increasing operations in the Region. Coming hot off the heels of the Japanese and European Datacenter expansion, which saw the addition of 4 new worlds to the European side and a reshuffle of the Japanese sever structure and the implementation of the cross Datacenter travel feature.
This is just the first wave of Square Enix's plan to expand the operations of Final Fantasy XIV after servers buckled under the load of new players last year in June and later with the launch of the Endwalker expansion. The North American region was supposed to get the first big upgrade in server structure after the addition of the Oceanian Datacenter back in January. The plan was and still is to add a new Datacenter to the North American server cluster with four new worlds for players to inhabit.
According to Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida, those plans had to be postponed to November 2022 for now. The reason for that is an issue with the delivery of equipment due to the worldwide semiconductor storage, which has been wreaking havoc all over the tech industry since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yoshida is however confident that this delay will not further influence the second phase of their server expansion plans next year. Here, the North American servers will get four more worlds added to the new logistical Datacenter by spring or summer, increasing the Datacenter set up to a 8:8:8:8 configuration. Similarly to the current configuration of the Japanese Datacenters, which has recently been shuffled around to take the stress off the login servers.
This leaves us with the European servers, those who have also recently seen two more worlds to both their Datacenters, Light and Chaos. Migrating to those new servers or creating a new character currently, rewards players with additional game-time of 15 days and in-game item rewards. If everything plays out according to schedule, the European servers will also see an entirely new Datacenter with eight worlds added to the clustery by next year.
The team also plans a ‘yet-larger-scale' upgrade to the North American Datacenter and hopefully even more regions getting their own Datacenter in the future. Maybe we'll soon get to see a South American, Middle Eastern and African Datacenter so players from that region. But Square Enix has always been prudent on that front. Only after extensive complaining and begging did our OCE friends finally get their own Datacenter after being stranded on the Japanese and North American Datacenters, cursed with sometimes abysmal ping.
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