Square-Enix has announced that Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn’s patches and updates have been shifted around due to the team’s transitioning to a work-from-home set up. Specifically, patch 5.3, which was scheduled to go live in June, won’t be making its originally scheduled launch.
In a post on the game’s official site, Producer & Director Naoki Yoshida said that when a state of emergency was declared in Tokyo, where the bulk of the Final Fantasy XIV team is based, the studio had been working on patch 5.25, and was able to complete it as employees made their shift from working in an office to working at their homes. However, as not every employee has been able to make that transition as easily as others, that patch was completed by only those who were able to work from a home setup or safely go to Square-Enix’s office.
Now that work has begun on patch 5.3, Yoshida says that the team has run into significant issues that have made key features impossible to implement on the orignal timetable, including:
- Delayed delivery of graphical assets due to the lockdown of cities in East Asia, North America, and Europe.
- Delayed voice recording due to the lockdown of cities in Europe.
- Delays to development tasks performed by Tokyo staff due to work-from-home/shelter-in-place limitations.
- Production and QA teams operating well below normal capacity due to work-from-home/shelter-in-place limitations.
While Yoshida says there isn’t a definitive new timeline for this update, he says the team hopes to have everything ready to go within a few weeks, but also says that it could take up to another month depending on how things go moving forward.
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Beyond the delayed update, Yoshida says that Final Fantasy XIV’s servers will be running as usual during the team’s movement to its work-from-home setup, but said that it may take longer to hear responses from customer support for the time being.
Yoshida signed off by giving fans an update on the studio’s health, telling fans that employees were “doing fine at present.”
This is another example of games and studios being affected by the coronavirus pandemic, like earlier this month, The Last of Us: Part II and Iron Man VR were delayed indefinitely as Sony tries to figure out how to do a worldwide launch in the midst of this crisis.
In other Final Fantasy news, Final Fantasy VII Remake launched today on PlayStation 4, but will come to other platforms sometime next year. While we don’t have a review live on the site, expect a lot of coverage of the game in the coming days and weeks, including guides on finding things like Moogle Medals, podcasts with perspectives from people with different histories with the series, as well as write-ups on how the state of the world has affected the game and its launch.
