Final Fantasy XIV is expanding all its Data Centers and Regions

After months of huge queues and a population crisis in Final Fantasy XIV, a new announcement has revealed an expansion to the game’s servers and Data Centers. In a post on the Final Fantasy XIV Lodestone website, game Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida thanked players for their patience and announced the Data Center expansion.

The post details a considerable number of changes, including the opening of the Oceanian Data Center, the relaunch of the Home World Transfer service, the launch of the Data Center Transfer Service, the expansion of all existing Data Centers, and the game going back on sale.

Related: When does Final Fantasy XIV’s Oceanian Data Center open?

How many new Data Centers are being added?

In total, the game will receive 25 new Worlds (servers) and five new Data Centers over the next 18 months. The complete list of added Data Centers and Worlds is below:

• Oceanian Data Centers: Launching with one Data Center and Five Worlds, Launches Jan. 25, 2022
• Japanese Data Centers: An additional logical Data Center, but no new worlds. The existing 32 worlds will be spread across these Data Centers, with eight Worlds per Data Center. Starts Jul. 22, 2022
• North American Data Centers: Two-phase expansion which adds one new Data Center, and four new Worlds in August 2022, and another four Worlds in Summer 2023
• European Data Centers: Two-phase expansion. Four worlds added to the two existing Data Centers in July 2022, and eight more Worlds added on a new Data Center in Summer 2023.

This is a genuinely enormous expansion. In the post, Yoshida estimates that Japanese expansion alone will allow for 50,000 additional players to be online simultaneously. Furthermore, the increase in server capacity will be welcomed by a player base that has had to endure queues in the thousands on almost every server during the latest expansion’s release. 

World Transfers and Data Center Visiting

The update also revealed new information about the much anticipated Data Center visiting and transfers feature. Last year it was revealed that in the Endwalker expansions, players would be able to visit and play with players on any Data Center in the world. However, this feature was delayed due to the huge strain on the game’s servers over the past 12 months.

With this new update, conventional within Data Center visits have been restored, and cross-region travel is set to be implemented in a post 6.1 patch. Players will be able to visit Worlds in other logical data centers within the same physical Data Center, but travel between regions, such as NA players visiting Japanese Data Centers, is currently not being implemented. The post explains that while cross-region travel is technically possible, they’re still considering whether adding it is viable. 

So you’ll have to wait a little bit longer to play with friends from other regions in Final Fantasy XIV. But if you want to play with friends in the same region, restrictions are close to being lifted.

For more information about the new Data Centers check out When does Final Fantasy XIV’s Oceanian Data Center open? on Pro Game Guides.