If there’s one thing common to all previous expansions of Final Fantasy XIV, it’s the insanely long queue times and error messages while attempting to log on. With that in mind, it seems that Square Enix is doing everything it can to minimize disruption when Dawntrail arrives for early access on June 28.
As well as recently implementing cross data center travel, which is now available for anyone who wants to go on a quick jaunt to an Oceanic data center, there will soon be an additional three European worlds available when the new Shadow data center goes live alongside the already existing European data centers Chaos and Light.
New worlds included within the Shadow data center will be:
- Innocence
- Pixie
- Titania
There is no set date for this data center to go live, but following maintenance (and the necessary downtime) on May 7, the new worlds will be selectable when creating a new character. However, if you select one of these new worlds when creating a character, this will produce an error message until the data centers go live.
As with all new worlds, creating a character or relocating an existing character to these worlds will bring benefits, such as the Road to 80 perk, which offers a huge boost in EXP under level 80 for a period of time.
It remains to be seen whether these measures do anything to alter the troubles of previous expansions, but anything has to be better than the 6,000 strong queues and repeated errors during Endwalker‘s release, which forces you out of the queue when you’ve been sitting there waiting for three hours, shoving you right to the back again. That hurts, especially during the limited time of the early access weekend.
