Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy 14 patch 6.18 will launch on July 5, with both the long-promised Data Center Travel option and a bunch of new servers.
Patch 6.18 introduces the long-awaited Data Center Travel option, which will finally allow players to visit different Data Centers within their own region. So a player in a World (or server, in more common parlance) on North America's Primal Data Center will now be able to visit Worlds on Aether or Crystal, for example. Sadly, this option does not allow for cross-region play.
We already knew that Data Center Travel would be part of patch 6.18, but alongside the update's release date, the devs have also announced that four more Worlds will be introduced for EU Data Centers: Sagittarius and Phantom on Chaos, and Alpha and Raiden on Light. (Revengeance enthusiasts are already having a lot of fun with the Raiden name.)
The devs are heavily incentivizing new characters on those new Worlds, with a double XP bonus, gear vouchers, one million gil, and 14 free days of playtime if you make it to level 30. Existing characters can transfer into the new worlds for free, and will also get the benefit of the double XP bonus.
Final Fantasy 14 struggled so mightily to keep up with its server load post-Endwalker that the game was temporarily removed from sale - and the issues were particularly pronounced in the EU region. Hopefully these new servers will help to ease the load.
Maintenance for patch 6.18 will begin on July 5, and as the devs note in the announcement, downtime is expected to last for 24 hours.
The next major content update, Final Fantasy 14 patch 6.2, will get its Live Letter reveal on July 1.
