On March 24, 2024, the Final Fantasy XIV team will be launching a test phase for cross-region data center travel. This will allow players to visit other regions hosted in physical data centers across the globe. Currently, visiting other players in the same physical data center is

Originally, players would need select the same data center and world to be able to play together outside of instanced duties. Next, the ability to visit other worlds in the same group became possible with the introduction of the World Visit system. Then, the ability to travel to different data centers hosted in the same physical location was added. Finally, players from different regional data centers will be able to travel back and forth — if all goes according to plan, that is.

The move is also in anticipation of the upcoming Dawntrail expansion, specifically as a potential mitigating factor for data centers experiencing high volume at peak hours. This was especially a problem during the Endwalker expansion, where many players encountered extremely long queue times for weeks after the game’s official launch. It created such a bottleneck that Square Enix was forced to suspend digital sales for over a month.

The test will run from Sunday, March 24th until the maintenance period preceding the Dawntrail expansion. During this test, players currently in the Japanese, North American, and European regional data centers will be able to travel to the Oceania data center. The team hopes that “a limited form” of cross-region travel will help ease expansion launch congestion, and they note that while players travelling to a geographically distant location will experience higher latency, they hope you check it out to fulfill their needs for testing.