That’s not bad!
Although it’s not quite making the 6.1 update, Final Fantasy XIV data center travel is coming in patch 6.18, and it sounds pretty great.
Again, the concept is that players can travel within their own data center, in a bid to hang out or play content with friends. We’ve gotten quite a bit of info on the process in the past, but Square Enix just put out a new blog detailing a few more scraps, including the length of time it might take to actually finish the process. Ready? Here we go:
“The Data Center Travel process typically takes somewhere between less than a minute to three minutes to complete. We hope you’ll make use of this feature and socialize with your newfound neighbors!”
Boom. So “less than a minute” (which could mean near-instant?) to “three minutes” at the top-end. And given how open the Final Fantasy XIV team is with things like this, I expect that top estimate to be fairly accurate, unless something goes wrong (which can happen in XIV).
Producer Naoki “Yoshi P” Yoshida also clarified a few other things in the blog, like the shift to implement data center travel alongside of the “world” (the delineation above data centers) redistribution: in other words, they’re happening at the same time now. This will all happen before the new housing goes up for sale, too.
Finally, patch 6.1 seems ready to go for the prior “mid-April” target:
“Patch 6.1, Newfound Adventure, has entered its final stage of development, and our team is hard at work debugging and fine-tuning its story and other content to create an experience worthy of this new beginning.”
It’s pretty much all good news! Now we just have to wait for all of these things to be implemented, and hopefully steady up the game for years to come.
As a refresher, here are the main tenets of the Final Fantasy XIV data center travel system:
- You can travel within the same data center: so from Japan to Japan, North America to North America, Europe to Europe, and Oceanian to Oceanian (if you need a reminder of how all the servers are broken down, you can find the full list here)
- To queue up the process, you’ll do it at the character select screen, which will put you into that other server as a traveler (with the <traveler> tag above your head) – after that you’ll go back to the title screen for a countdown; it cannot be canceled, and you need to repeat the process to go back to your “home” server (you can see what the menu looks like above for this part)
- The main purpose is to “challenge duties from players from those data centers” (so expand your static and raid groups)
- Limitations include restrictions for free company chat, cross-world linkshell chat, PVP teams, and the same restrictions as the world visit system
