Final Fantasy 14 returns to sale after being pulled for being too popular
About a month or so ago, the fourteenth (!!!) installment in the legendary Final Fantasy RPG series hit a bit of a snag. A snag which, on first glance, would appear to be a blessing rather than a curse in literally any other context: it was exceedingly, overwhelmingly popular. See, 14 is a special case in the series in that it’s an online game – specifically, a replacement for a 2010 incarnation of the title which was, to put it bluntly, complete and utter tripe. I’m serious. Actual codswallop. Though the retooled version has been around since 2013, it’s been regularly serviced with updates to keep bringing in new players; and it’s the most recent of said updates, December’s Endwalker expansion, which did its job a tad too well.
The wave of new content brought a tremendous surge of users flooding into the servers, which were simply not equipped to deal with the strain of hundreds of new faces pounding at the gates. Rather than sitting back and watching them buckle and break, developer Square-Enix decided ‘sod this’ and pulled the game from sale, cold turkey, while they tinkered with things behind the scenes. Now, as GameSpot reports, it’s back, and is now better rigged to handle the larger capacity.
Final Fantasy 14 in phases
“Global server capacity is being expanded,” states the report, “with an Oceanian data center opening on January 25, while North American and European data centers will be expanded across multiple phases.” These new locations should hopefully reduce some of the pressure the game has been experiencing. It’s clear this is intended to be a long-term plan. It says “a two-phase expansion for American regions will commence from August 2022.” Wow, way to be optimists, guys. You go for it.
But what of the disgruntled fans who found themselves booted from their favourite RPG-verse during the downtime? “Players were compensated with 14 days of free play time to make up for the congestion and long queue times,” it turns out, “but director Naoki Yoshida explained that a new lockdown on the game servers may be enforced if server stability is threatened again.”. Well hey, these days, what’s one more lockdown into the mix?
Are you happy to see Final Fantasy XIV return? Let us know!
Via, GameSpot.
