Final Fantasy 14 Update 5.3 Will Now Launch In August

Final Fantasy XIV's delayed 5.3 patch will now arrive in August, Square Enix has announced. The update was originally scheduled to release on June 16 but had to be postponed due to production difficulties that arose from the COVID-19 pandemic. As it turns out, however, that delay only bumped it back by a few weeks.

"I would like to apologize again to all of our players for the delay of Patch 5.3--Reflections in Crystal, which was originally scheduled to release on June 16th," game producer and director Naoki Yoshida wrote on FFXIV's official forums. "Although our development and operations teams, as well as QA testing, have experienced a number of setbacks due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), I am pleased to inform you that development production is back on course, and we've settled on a new patch release schedule."

Yoshida went on to announce that Patch 5.3 is now scheduled to launch on August 11. "We did everything we could to try and release this update at some point in mid-July, but in the end, we determined more time was needed to thoroughly test and debug the next alliance raid of YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse and the new large-scale encounters of the resistance weapons content," Yoshida said.

YoRHa: Dark Apocalypse is a 24-player, level 80 alliance raid series based on Nier: Automata. That game's director, Yoko Taro, has been personally involved in writing content for the event. Square Enix had previously announced that the next dungeon in the series would be called The Puppet's Bunker, but it didn't share many details beyond that. We'll have to wait to find out more.

Although development on FFXIV has hit numerous snags due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Yoshida announced the team's "primarily home-based work system is now securely established, and we plan to return to our regular release schedule of roughly every three and a half months after Patch 5.3." Yoshida didn't divulge any specifics as to what future updates will hold, but he shared a sketch of one thing the team has been working on.

Square Enix will share more details about the upcoming 5.3 patch in the lead up to its release. The company will air another Letter from the Producer Live broadcast on Wednesday, July 22, and it'll add interviews and other updates to the 5.3 special site later this month. In the meantime, the Moogle Treasure Trove event is still underway in the game.