With the early access and official release of Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail just around the corner, a new Data Center—dubbed “Shadow”—will soon join Chaos and Light in the European server banks to help with launch-day queues.
The new Shadow DC will consist of three world servers named after some familiar faces from the Shadowbringers expansion: Innocence, Pixie, and Titania.
Following the implementation of Materia, Meteor, and Dynamis throughout 2022, Shadow is the fourth new DC in a series of efforts by the dev team to prevent the Endwalker launch disaster from happening to Dawntrail. Players who lived through the catastrophe of December 2021 will remember the hours spent simply trying to get into the game to play Endwalker. Having to sit through a queue of thousands of players before being allowed into the world servers was considered lucky—most players found themselves booted out of the queue by the infamous 2002 server error and forced to start again.
Currently, Shadow has no official date, though it’ll be added to FFXIV’s login menu as of the maintenance period planned on May 7. According to the official announcement, the opening date will be based on “the number of concurrent logins,” leaving it somewhat unclear where it’ll fit in Dawntrail’s prerelease schedule.
With only three new worlds (the fewest in one DC to date) and an unclear launch date that comes over a year after all the previous post-Endwalker DCs, the Shadow DC is a welcome but somewhat unexpected addition to announce just two months before the next expansion. Once it’s implemented, every major server region will have received at least one new DC to help with server congestion issues; hopefully, it’ll be enough to prevent another login queue calamity when Dawntrail finally releases.
