Outbreak of COVID-19 and Final Fantasy XIV
Because of the outbreak of COVID-19 and the order of maintaining social distance, the Final Fantasy XIV team has assured that their patch development of the game will be postponed by a month.
Naoki Yoshida, the game director of Final Fantasy, has outlined that the impact and outbreak of COVID-19 is a solid barrier to prevent the development of the game. He has also said that the next update will come later.
The patch 5.2 was launched in February of this year, and it seems like the next one will be scheduled for the middle of June 2020, and it can drop 2 or 3 weeks late, and in the worst case, it can take even more weeks.
What did Naoki Yoshida say about Final Fantasy XIV?
Final Fantasy XIV relies on the development of the developers, along with the QA partners worldwide. At this point, they have to accept that the condition will remarkably affect their development schedule. Yoshida also said that at that time there they were in a fix what to do, as they couldn’t understand either that would be possible to minimize the delay to a few weeks, perhaps 2 or 3 weeks, or that could take even a month. They were terribly sorry for the disappointment. Yoshida also added that it was important to prioritize the mental and physical health of their developing team because, without them, they would have never be able to release the quality features and updates that the players expected from Final Fantasy XIV. That’s why they asked for the understanding as they adjusted their proper schedule with the situation.
Yoshida gave four neat and clean reasons why the game patch development will be disturbed because of the novel coronavirus –
- Delayed delivery of the graphical assets because of the lockdown
- Delayed voice recording because of the lockdown
- Delayed development tasks by the Tokyo staff because of limitations
- Production and QA teams below normal capacity because of limitations