Square Enix wants to let Final Fantasy 14 fans play with others who live across the globe, though certain challenges throw up a barrier to making that happen.
Speaking to the press as part of Final Fantasy 14 Fan Fest, director and producer Naoki Yoshida tackles a question over whether the team would consider implementing cross-regional data centre visits or a cross-regional duty finder queue system.
Yoshida says that the technical aspects of allowing players to travel between North America, Europe, Japan, and Oceanic data centres are built, though the team isn't sure whether they should open the gates just yet as the culture between each region "differ significantly."
"Is it okay to just suddenly open the floodgates for everybody to intermingle? I'm afraid we still don't have enough information for us to have the confidence to open that up," Yoshida says. "Because we will have different communities being jumbled in together with the gates opening, we would still like to continue looking at how data centre travel is being utilised and what the situation is like. We'd like to take our time to assess before we start considering inter-regional travel."
As for a cross-regional duty queue system, the team is figuring it out. Yoshida says he has spoken to the team’s “super server engineer” several times to see what they can do to make that happen, with one meeting happening only recently.
“There are many challenges that we have to overcome from a technical and infrastructure perspective. But I mean, a challenge is a challenge. We want to overcome that challenge. We don't want to give up on the idea. I think that's what makes my team very talented. And that's what their strength is. So we're trying. We're trying to figure out how we can possibly work this out.”
Elsewhere at Fan Fest, Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy 14’s next big expansion is Dawntrail, and it’s out next Summer. We’re getting two new DPS jobs, a graphics upgrade, a race from Final Fantasy 10, and so much more.
Before then, we have patch 6.5 to lay the foundations of what’s to come. The update also marks the point that the Free Trial will extend to the Stormblood expansion and kickstart a beta for Final Fantasy 14’s Xbox edition.
