360 FFXI beta ending April-ish

TOKYO--In Japan, Square Enix announced that the Xbox 360 Final Fantasy XI beta will end shortly before the game's release on April 20 in Japan. (The game launches April 18 in North America.) Square Enix hasn't disclosed the exact date of when the beta test will end, as it is still investigating whether it can let beta-testers migrate their accounts to the official FFXI servers without causing any technical problems. The publisher will make an official announcement soon.

April 20 will also mark the release of the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion for the PC and PlayStation 2 versions of FFXI. The expansion will be included in the regular version Xbox 360 FFXI, which also comes with the two previous upgrades (Girade no Genei and Chains of Promathia) integrated into the game. The next-gen version of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game will sport a larger user interface for HDTVs, and it will allow the numeric keypad on USB keyboards to be used for text input as well as character control.

Currently, the Xbox 360 FFXI beta test is taking place solely on the Hydra world server. However, Square Enix has said that the volume of Xbox 360 players on the server is far exceeding that of other world servers. The company states that there are tens of thousands of Xbox 360 users participating in the beta test, mostly from the United States and Europe.