Final Fantasy 14 goes back on sale Jan. 25, as Square Enix eases server congestion

Square Enix will resume digital sales of its hit MMO, Final Fantasy 14 Online, later this month as it rolls out additional data centers to ease server congestion for the exceedingly popular role-playing game. Final Fantasy 14 producer Naoki Yoshida outlined the company’s plan in a note on the game’s official website Thursday, saying that sales of the MMO will resume on Jan. 25, the same day a new data center is scheduled to go online.

Final Fantasy 14’s Oceanian data center, serving players in Australia, New Zealand, and nearby territories in the region, will go online Jan. 25. It will add five new Worlds (aka instances) for regional players to transfer to. Yoshida said that players in Oceania should have a better play experience on the new data center, and that Square Enix is waiving transfer fees to those new worlds.

Yoshida said that the Final Fantasy 14 team also plans to reconfigure the game’s Japanese data centers in July; and expand the European and North American data centers in July and August, respectively, to contend with ongoing server congestion in the wake of the Endwalker expansion’s release in December.

Final Fantasy 14 Online saw a resurgence in player interest last summer for a variety of reasons, leading to overwhelming player numbers and new measures from Square Enix to contend with congestion. When the game’s highly anticipated expansion Endwalker launched in December, Square Enix took the unusual (but not unprecedented) move of suspending sales of the game to give paying customers a chance to play the nearly decade-old MMO.