GamerEscape

This morning, Square Enix announced the Final Fantasy XI Fan Gathering 2020 which will take place in Boston during next year’s PAX East (which will be held from February 27th to March 1st).

The last time Square Enix set the stage for Final Fantasy XI players to gather in North America was during the 2008 Fan Festival in Hollywood, so you can imagine the excitement that the NA player base is feeling right now.

We are excited to announce that we will be hosting a Fan Gathering in Boston during PAX East! This is your chance to meet and talk all things FFXI with like-minded adventurers and old friends in historical Boston. Guests can enjoy drinks, snacks, and fun trivia with amazing prizes!

To make the event extra special, we will be joined by two distinguished guests from the FFXI development team, Director Yoji Fujito and Producer Akihiko Matsui. The duo will be on hand to host a Q&A session and special presentation. You won’t want to miss out!

Further details for this event will be announced at a later date, so please look forward to it!

In retrospect, the Boston event was actually teased last month during the Final Fantasy XI Digest #7 video, where we were shown a beautiful new image by artist Mitsuhiro Arita. The developers stated that while they couldn’t show the image up close in the video, they “would like to have opportunity in the future for our Western players to take a closer look.”

With the game still receiving monthly updates, even after its story concluded, it feels likely that any special presentation the developers would hold would likely include previews of upcoming version updates. And certainly, while that’s all well and good, I believe that the question that will be on a lot of people’s minds is the status of Final Fantasy XI Mobile (which has recently been called Final Fantasy XI R in Nexon’s investor reports).

While we’re certainly happy for the event, we can’t help but wonder — Why hold an event for the game now? Will Square Enix finally show off Final Fantasy XI R² in an official capacity? Or could we perhaps get more of an idea of what the team is planning for the 20th anniversary of the game, which will arrive in 2022 and could potentially mark the end of service?

Time will tell.