Square Enix announced on March 3 that it will be implementing even more measures to address overpopulation in Final Fantasy XI’s servers.
The MMORPG’s director and producer Yoji Fujito explains that Odin World – which is the game’s third largest server – has been seeing ongoing congestion since the latter half of 2025 due to an increase in new players. Since too many concurrent servers can overwhelm the server and cause issues, Odin will be closed to new players starting March 10. This means that players will no longer be able to create new characters on the Odin server nor transfer them to Odin using the Character World Transfer service.
This trend continues from July last year, when Final Fantasy XI’s largest server Asura World was closed off, followed by the closure of the second most populated server Bahamut in October 2025. With the two top servers being closed, it seems the influx of new Final Fantasy XI players trickled to Odin, which as a result also grew crowded. After March 10, new players will have to opt for some of the game’s other servers like Phoenix.
According to Fujito, while Asura and Bahamut have seen a slight decrease in overall player population in the meantime, the server load remains relatively unchanged, so it looks like these Worlds will remain closed off for the time being.
Can’t understand people that waste money monthly for games like this that can’t even keep a GB worth of player data when games like Fortnite are free and don’t have any server problems.
Because Fortnite is shite catering for 11 year olds while FFXI is an incredible experience? Not that hard to understand
As a longtime XI player, XI has it’s niche. It’s not a flashy theme park experience like Fortnite or FF14. Nor does SE actively advertise it’s continued existence. It’s more like stepping into a national park, like Yosemite, Yellowstone, or the Everglades. Once you can see past the trees, you find a wealth of things to do and places to see.