Yesterday, for the first time in the game’s history, Final Fantasy XIV received a brand new regional data center. Hosted in Sydney, the ‘Materia’ Data Center is set to service the player base in Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia (SEA), who have previously found themselves distributed across the game’s North American, Japanese and European servers. At launch, the data center houses five worlds – Bismarck, Ravana, Sephirot, Sophia and Zurvan – named after five primals featured in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward.
To mark the release, developer and publisher Square Enix shared the above map. While it is sadly not canonical, it features the maps of Australia and New Zealand done in the style of Final Fantasy XIV’s in-game maps, and provides a look at some of the landmarks and enemies that you may find were it ever included in-game.
While little more than a gimmick, it is a wonderful little addition to officially welcome the Oceanian data center to the wider Final Fantasy XIV community. Let’s just hope that it will be possible to visit the Materia worlds from other data centers very soon…
Final Fantasy XIV is a long-running MMORPG which makes use of a monthly subscription model using real world money. However, it does feature a free trial, which is currently postponed due to server congestion caused by increased interest and the launch of its newest Endwalker expansion pack. You can now purchase it on the PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
