Final Fantasy XIV‘s third major post-release update Reflections in Crystal will arrive on August 11th, per a new letter penned by the game’s producer and director Naoki Yoshida.

Setbacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the date from its original June 16th release, as Square Enix transitioned staff from the office to home work. While the team wanted to hit a mid-July release, it was determined that more testing needed to be done on the new alliance raid The Puppets’ Bunker (part of the NieR Automata collaboration) and the next stage of Resistance weapon quests. In order to facilitate this testing the office needed to be prepared for staff to conduct it safely.

While Final Fantasy XIV’s quarterly patches have released in a regular fashion up to the pandemic, Yoshida shared that the schedule has been offset by two months. Rather than speed up development of Patch 5.4, 5.5, and the next expansion, the team is going to proceed by the offset schedule so they can maintain the quality of the content while they work safely at home or in the office.

They also shared an image from Patch 5.3 development to whet fans appetites:

More information on Patch 5.3 will be revealed in the next Letter from the Producer Live broadcast scheduled for July 22nd. In the meantime, you can read over our summary of the previous broadcast which contains a rundown of Patch 5.3 content.

Final Fantasy XIV is now available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Mac.