Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail is now just a few weeks away, but after the server nightmare that accompanied the launch of Endwalker, there are fears that we might have a whole lot of long wait times for the new expansion. Producer and director Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida is confident that won't be the case.
"We know that after the peak has passed, we can usually expect 2,000 or 3,000 players on average," Yoshida says at a media event 12DOVE attended, addressing the heavy server loads that accompanied Endwalker back in 2021. "So from that perspective, it wouldn't make sense that we arranged the box so that it would accommodate 10,000, for example. It was a source of great inconvenience for our players last time."
This time around, "since we are looking toward the future of Final Fantasy 14 and its expansion as well, we have been excessive with planning and preparing servers and we have those servers prepared," Yoshida says. "So now, if we feel it is necessary, we can open up the new servers with a press of a button. I think there's almost no chance that we would face a situation where we cannot accommodate the number of players required."
In fact, Yoshida believes the servers will be so smooth this time around that it might feel like fewer people are playing the game. "There may be some people comparing the situation to last time, and they may be saying, 'Oh, well, now no one has any issues accessing the new expansion. So there must have been a drop in players.'" Yoshida says, "The reason for this is because we've prepared so many new servers."
In addition to the more scalable servers, Final Fantasy 14 has also added a bunch of new US Worlds recently, and features like server travel are also intended in part to help players manage long queues. But there's one thing the devs still really can't account for, and that's DDoS attacks, which have been plaguing FF14 even within the past month.
These attacks are "very simple in nature, but it's precisely because of that, that it's difficult for us to defend ourselves," Yoshida says, since it essentially comes down to compromised PCs "just completely spamming F5 against certain IP addresses." There's no foolproof plan to work against it, but Yoshida says the team is taking what measures it can to mitigate the effects of these attacks. "I just hope that everyone can remember that we are putting in the effort to defend ourselves," he says.
There's a reason Final Fantasy 14 ranks so highly on our list of the best MMORPGs.
