There’s nothing more frustrating than joining Final Fantasy XIV only to find out that your friends are on another data center. Right now, you can jump across to another data center temporarily with Data Center Travel, or use the Home World Transfer service to request a full move to a different data center. But what if you could just party up with anyone from any data center through the Duty Finder?
Apparently, that dream is one that FFXIV creative director and producer Naoki Yoshida shares. At PAX East 2023 (via The Eorzean Archives) over the past weekend, a fan asked Yoshida about his goals for the next 10 years of our critically-acclaimed MMORPG. As part of his response, Yoshida mentioned allowing players to party up across data centers, in addition to simply having more data centers in regions around the world.
“Final Fantasy XIV I know there are certain regions that don’t have full support. For example, setting up a physical data center, so that we don’t have to worry too much about latency. Or there are certain languages that are not supported, so it would be nice if we could start working on looking into some of those,” he stated. “Another thing would be—and this would be quite an undertaking—trying to connect all of the different regions, so that no matter where you are in the world, you’ll be able to sync up with and party up with other players.”
The response from Yoshida included a lingering hope for those Xbox platform players that are out there in the cold. “Otherwise, there are still certain platforms that we’re not, we don’t have the game on,” he added.
Would you want to play FFXIV will players from around the world? It’s not like there’s a ton of communication in your standard Duty Roulette, but perhaps the language barrier or different cultural standards might get in the way. Still, that’s an open question, because as Yoshida noted, it’s not coming to Final Fantasy XIV anytime soon. Instead, we’re patiently waiting for Patch 6.4, which is coming down the pipeline sometime soon. In fact, there’s a Live Letter covering the patch coming this Friday!
