Final Fantasy 14 recently expanded its European and Japanese data centers to help ease chronic server congestion earlier this month. Europe received four new worlds, with the Home World Transfer Service reactivating just last week after Square Enix confirmed the new servers were stable enough to handle the flood of players looking to check out the new worlds.
While the worst of Final Fantasy 14’s server congestion was in Europe, North America could also use a few more worlds. Square Enix had initially planned to start phase one of its North American data center expansion in August, but the global chip shortage has once again reared its ugly head and delayed North America’s new worlds.
"We have tried to coordinate with related parties in hopes of finding a solution, but ultimately a delay proved unavoidable," wrote FF14 director Naoki 'Yoshi-P' Yoshida in today’s announcement. "As a result, it will be difficult to keep to our original schedule, and we regrettably have to postpone the first phase of the expansion to November 2022.
"I sincerely apologize to those of you who have been looking forward to the first phase, which will add four Worlds under a new logical data center. We will share further schedule details as soon as they are decided, and ask for your patience in the meantime."
The good news is that the timing of the second phase of the expansion remains unchanged and is currently scheduled to add another four more worlds between spring and summer of 2023.
The global chip shortage continues to be an annoying feature of the pandemic. With technology advancing and chip supplies restricted, there just aren't enough chips in the world to make everything from cars to home consoles. Worse, it's also leading existing chip-makers to raise prices for processors, with Intel planning to hike prices for some of its products between 10 and 20 percent.
But there are some hopeful signs that things might be getting back to normal, albeit slowly. The crypto crash has put a load of crypto miners out of work, leading to GPU prices that are now lower than at any time during the pandemic.