Final Fantasy XI ‘s April update has arrived with returning Ambuscade objectives and an update to the new Term Filter feature.

Recently, producer Akihiko Matsui announced that he would be stepping down from his role on the game and handing responsibilities over to Yoji Fujito, who will now serve as Final Fantasy XI’s producer and director to continue long-term operations of the game. The size of the development team and scale of further updates will be reduced for several reasons, namely as long-term staff on the project move on to new projects with newer technology, and that remaining staff can continue to keep service stable.

Fujito commented that some of the equipment that is used to develop the game is now severely outdated, and was recently used to create The Voracious Resurgence scenario, but that’s the limit for now. This was one of the factors that led to the decision to downsize the development team. He added that even if the team could renew the development environment with the latest tools and middleware, it wouldn’t benefit our developers to limit themselves to this outdated technology.

While monthly updates will be smaller in scale, the team plans to continue updating Ambuscade and hold the Login Campaign events. For the rest of 2023, they’ll also be implementing further reforging of Prime weapons and new Master Trials, as well as an activity where adventurers on all Worlds can work together to complete certain objectives. More details will be shared in the future.

In other news, the team is looking to replace the game servers, or the back end of operations. The servers that are currently being used have been in service for a very long time, and in order to keep the game running in the long-term, they need to be replaced should the older ones fail. There will be a long maintenance to perform this replacement, so Fujito asks for players’ patience when that time comes.

More real-world merchandise is also planned, and the meeting to decide what kind of merchandise has recently concluded, so Fujito hopes you will be excited for upcoming announcements.

Ambuscade

Volume One of April’s Ambuscade update features Goblins, while Volume Two features Shadow Dragons. These encounters will not feature any adjustments from their previous iterations, so reviewing your previous strategy will be effective.

In the new release cadence, Ambuscade encounters will be updated monthly on a two-year rotation.

Term Filter

An update to the Term Filter feature will allow you to use certain regular expressions when entering terms into your text files. You’ll be able to filter terms that are a partial match and even specify a specific range of characters to filter for and it can be used in conjunction with the features released in last month’s update. This month’s update will be the final update to the term filter feature for now, but the team plans on compiling all the explanations for its features in one location.

The Voracious Resurgence

The ongoing scenario The Voracious Resurgence will be on hold as the team “pours their everything” into thelatter half of Part 2 which is planned for the May update.