At the beginning of November, the game director Naoki Yoshida announced, the way filled with sadness, that the launch planned for November 23 could not be done as it is: a postponement of a few days being necessary to carry out a suitable outing. A difficult but laudable decision as some recent productions stand out for their lack of finishes.
Still, this slight shift has, of course, allowed the teams to refine the extension but also added two additional weeks of impatience to the counters of a whole host of avid MMO players. The consequences of this were also manifested from the launch of early access, even though Square Enix had warned players, and the servers found themselves overloaded!
Despite everything, Square Enix had to quickly make decisions in the face of this triumphant success. In addition to compensation, it is decisions as drastic as they are unexpected that are talked about today. Against all expectations, the Japanese publisher announced, through the voice of Naoki Yoshida, neither more nor less than the suspension of dematerialized sales as well as the suspension of shipments for physical versions! And, in the same way, registrations for free trials and advertising campaigns are also affected!
All this is supposed to be put in place over the next few days, but it seems that Square Enix sees this announcement as the only way to stem the phenomenon of server congestion. Voluntarily concerned with feedback from players, the firm intends to offer additional compensation to players, namely 14 additional days of play in addition to the 7 previously granted.
This unprecedented compensation will be applied to all players with a full version of the game and an active subscription on December 21, 2024 at 7 p.m.. Naoki Yoshida also took advantage of the announcement of these exceptional measures to discuss some details around the game, including bugs, updates and, of course, the servers!
In the blog post signed by the hand of Naoki Yoshida, the latter apologizes for a long time but does not forget some bring interesting news regarding the Final Fantasy MMO, in particular with regard to certain points often underlined by the players. Recently, and in addition to the server concerns, they noticed an error occurring in the queue.
The 2002 error in question has since been identified and Yoshida announced that a fix was already ready and that it would be implemented in the 6.01 update scheduled for December 21.. For the moment, and even if the development teams are hard at work, the schedule is continuing and, as it stands, update 6.05 embarking on the Limbo raid of the Pandæmonium is still scheduled for Tuesday January 4th.
The other good, and ultimate, news of this message from Naoki Yoshida concerns game servers, one of the subjects considered essential for Square’s teams. Since July 2024, they have been working on setting up a new data center as well as adding new Worlds and these efforts will continue in the future with new additions to be able to provide a proper roadmap by the end of January 2024. Among the targeted regions are North America and Europe.
The entire message published by the game director can be found below. For more information on the Endwalker expansion, you can check out the review written in our columns!