Square Enix has addressed the anticipated server congestion that may occur during the early access and launch of Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion. 

With Final Fantasy 14 miraculously selling out of digital copies thanks to all the excitement surrounding the launch of the Endwalker expansion, there’s undoubtedly an obscene number of players waiting to get their hands on the expansion, and Square Enix is expecting problems.

In an effort to get ahead of the troubles that are going to arise, Square Enix has already stated that, in anticipation of increased player counts, they have “optimized our servers ahead of the expansion’s launch in order to increase login caps.”

Unfortunately, the anticipated server capacity problems can’t be simply solved by buying up more server space, as, due to the ongoing global shortage of semiconductors, Square Enix is “unable to add new Worlds before the release of Endwalker.” 

Square Enix might not be able to add new dedicated worlds, but they have been doing everything else they can do, such as “replacing the matching servers with higher-performance machines, optimizing processes, increasing processing speeds, and raising the number of simultaneous logins.”

As a result of the prophesized server problems, Square Enix has penned a blog post in which they “apologize for making this sort of announcement at a time when many of you are looking forward to the expansion, as well as for inconveniences that may be caused by congestion.”

After seeing the tumultuous launch of New World back in September, we can hardly say we’re surprised to hear about server troubles and wait times in an MMO once more. Hopefully, things don’t get so bad for Final Fantasy 14 that they need to give players a commemorative emote.