Rejoice, gamers—nearly six weeks after being pulled from digital storefronts, the critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14 is available to buy again.
Director and producer Naoki Yoshida announced on December 15 that sales and free trial registrations would be temporarily suspended due to the immense popularity of the recently-released expansion Endwalker. Anyone who attempted to play in those first few weeks will have felt the pain—spending hours waiting in the login queue only to get a network error and be booted right to the back of it with 3,000 people ahead of you. It wasn't exactly my definition of fun.
Thankfully, things have calmed down pretty significantly since the festive break. I can easily log in during peak hours and be in-game within 30 seconds. With everything seeming pretty stable for a while now, it was announced earlier this month that game sales would be resumed. It's a perfect time, too. The Oceania data center has just opened up for our friends down under, with five servers and some nice rewards for transferring over there. Square Enix even did an adorable FF14-style map for Australia and New Zealand to celebrate.
While sales are now back up and running, the free trial is still unavailable. It looks like Square Enix will be "monitoring server stability" now that the game is back on sale before deciding when to reintroduce free trial registration.
