Players can finally purchase Final Fantasy XIV again. Square Enix has set up a new data center for the popular game to help stabilize its crowded servers.
It’s no secret to anyone familiar with Square Enix’s massive multiplayer online RPG that it’s one of the most popular video games out there right now. But that popularity backfired, as Square Enix had to stop selling the title after a massive influx of new players triggered by its latest Endwalker expansion caused server troubles. Now, after six weeks and a server fix, players can purchase the game once more.
According to Naoki Yoshida, producer and director of FF14, the new player bump caused “extremely long wait times due to the dense concentration of play hours which far exceed our server capacity, especially during the peak times.” This led Yoshida and the team to start planning to expand the global server capacity.
Today saw the announcement of the first step of that plan with patch 6.08. This patch introduces new changes to the battle system and character classes, plus an all-new data center named Oceanian.
The new server launches on January 26, 2022, allowing for new character creation, as well as Home World Transfers, which grant players access to switch data centers.
The update also introduces “New Worlds,” which are worlds where players can transfer to and attain special bonuses. which include double experience points and currencies for in-game rewards.
While players can purchase the game once more, new free trial registrations are still prohibited. No new trial registration time has been mentioned as of yet.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.