Today, during the 74th FF14 Letter from the Producer Live broadcast, producer and director Naoki Yoshida finally provided news that will make many players happy. Update 6.3 in early January will bring forth the addition of new housing wards to all servers.
Each housing area will receive 6 regular wards and 6 subdivisions, which means that every server will get 1,800 new plots of land for players to build their homes.
All of these plots will be made available via the new lottery system. At the moment, we don’t yet know what the distribution between free companies and personal housing will be like, but Yoshida-san mentioned that it’ll be shared when we get closer to the update’s release.
This change couldn’t be any more welcome for many among the Final Fantasy XIV fanbase, who have been waiting for a long time for a mitigation of the housing crisis that affects most servers.
Since the available plots are finite, and the game has been increasingly popular with paying subscribers consistently on the rise, many players and free companies (FF14’s version of guilds) have been unable to secure a house and have been locked out of a very popular feature and prevented from enjoying all the content that comes with it.
On top of that, several large free companies have been unable to expand to the biggest houses considering that those are even more limited.
This has caused widespread malcontent among the usually loving fans of Square Enix’s MMORPG, and the new wards coming in January have a chance to help with that.
Back in April 2022, the developers attempted to mitigate the issue with the lottery system, which at least aims to make the acquisition of new plots a bit fairer, but ultimately you can’t make things much better without improving the availability of housing in general. It remains to be seen if 1,800 new plots will be enough to meet demand, but this is certainly a big step in the right direction.
Final Fantasy XIV is currently available for PS4, PS5, and PC. Besides the changes announced today, it’s also getting an update to the graphics scheduled to culminate with the next expansion.
