The amazingly active maintenance mode that included an entirely new storyline appears to be quietly ending for Final Fantasy XI. Producer and director Yoji Fujito has penned a letter for the new year, and he mentions that one of the big goals through 2023 was creating a stable archive of the game. And that’s not changing in 2024, as he specifically says that much of the work on the game will be focused upon operational maintenance like keeping the servers up to date and at least theoretically updating some of the development hardware and software in use.
Of course, it hardly needs to be said that the game is over two decades old and had been running on old server hardware and still required use of PlayStation 2 development kits for ages. Fujito makes it clear that there will still be content and events for fans to enjoy outside of the game, but it looks like the actual version updates will be rather thin for this year. On the plus side, there are some new bonus campaigns starting up next week, and FFXI just took our 2023 award for best classic MMO.
