Final Fantasy 11, a 23-year-old MMO, is getting so many new players it’s having to stop character creation on its busiest server

As someone who covers MMORPGs often for our own column, Terminally Online, it’s nice to be able to break from the usual doom and gloom about new MMOs (they really aren’t doing so hot) and share some positive news for once. News, for instance, like the fact that Final Fantasy 11 has so many new players it’s actually causing problems.

This has led to game director Yoji Fujito having to make an official announcement on the game’s pleasingly retro forums: “Once again, we are seeing periods of congestion on the game’s servers, this time with the Odin World, so I’d like to take a moment to explain what measures we will be taking to help address the issue.”

These measures include stopping players from transferring to Odin, as well as the creation of new characters on the server.

A point of context: Player counts like these are relative to the size of the servers themselves, and FF11’s aren’t exactly humongous. They’re not anything to sniff at, though, either—unless you’re World of Warcraft, most smaller MMOs can chug along happily at populations in the thousands, and according to an auction house database site at the time of writing, Final Fantasy 11 has around 87,700 active players.

For context, Star Trek Online has a daily Steam player count of just under 2,000 (not counting people playing it on other platforms). Albion, similarly, has a 24-hour peak just shy of 10,000 on the platform. The Odin server having around 13,000 active players alone means that FF11 is actually quite healthy by humbler MMO standards, and it’s very impressive for a 23-year-old game—24, in a couple of months.

It’s also not the first time in recent memory that Square Enix has had to do this—back in July of last year, it was Asura that was getting hammered, which is honestly a delight to see. I’m a sucker for the experience of classic MMOs, being recently very taken by Project Gorgon, and FF11 not just surviving, but thriving through its twilight years is genuinely lovely.

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