gamescom

Square Enix director/producer Naoki Yoshida has revealed that when Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn launches later this year the original game’s servers will be taken offline.

“Basically what’s going to happen is that the current story is still continuing now, but some day in the near future – and we’ll make sure we tell the players what day that is – something is going to happen in the story, and at that time the servers are going to shut down,” Yoshida told Massively at Gamescom. “Basically the player data will be taken over into the new game. So, to convert all this new data for the new systems, we need a certain amount of time to do this. There’s so much data, so many thousands of characters that we must do this for. And so, we have to shut down the servers.”

Players will be given plenty of warning before the server shutdown and will be offered priority access to A Realm Reborn‘s beta. As an added bonus players can try the beta as their original Final Fantasy XIV character.