Final Fantasy XIV Devs Working to Remove the Barriers Between Datacenters

The World Visit system recently implemented in Final Fantasy XIV, allows players to travel to servers within the same datacenter, but the team at Square Enix has its sights set on a larger goal.

At the moment, players from servers included in different datacenters cannot play together. Yet, during an interview at Gamescom in Germany, Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida told Twinfinite that this could change in he future.

While the physical datacenters will remain, the team is looking for ways to break the barriers between the datacenters, allowing us to play with everyone else regardless of server and datacenter. That being said, this is a very challenging task.

Developers are discussing internally how to make this possible from an engineering point of view. Unfortunately, it can’t just magically happen, but they’re working on it.

While it isn’t guaranteed that it’ll work, they have some ideas on how to make this “magic” happen. According to Yoshida-san, they’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and he encourages fans to wait for further news on this.

To better explain the concept, Yoshida-san doodled the sketch below 

The three big circles marked JP, EU, and NA are the physical datacenters for the three regions. Within each there are the “logical datacenters” like Crystal, Aether, and Primal in North America.

The big circle on the bottom right marked “E” represents what we have now, one enclosed logical datacenter in which players can freely move between servers. 

The first step the development team is planning to take is breaking the boundaries between logical datacenters. Yet, those boundaries are very solid, so they’ll need some “magic” to make it happen. 

The ultimate goal would be to remove the boundaries between physical datacenters (for instance between North America and Europe), but this will require “something extremely powerful like the Hydaelyn Kick” to be accomplished. 

Of course, you should stay tuned for the full interview, coming soon here on Twinfinite.

If you’re interested in the game (which has recently been updated to version 5.05), you can read our review of the latest expansion Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers and our article explaining why it features the best story among all the tales told by the Final Fantasy series.

If you like roleplaying, Square Enix also recently released the naming conventions for the new Viera and Hrothgar races.

Final Fantasy XIV is currently available for PS4 and PC.