Today is the day that Square and Enix have officially merged. The new company has already commented on several of it's projects that were in development prior to the merger. Final Fantasy XI was one of the games mentioned in those discussions. We have learned that the new company's anticipated release date for FFXI in North America is not until sometime in 2004. Due to Sony's current lack of plans for the release of the hard drive unit for the PS2 and their apparent desire to keep the North American PS2 MMORPG market to themselves with Everquest Online Adventures, Square Enix has decided to release it's own hard drive for the PS2. Because of this, the beta testing phase will take much longer then expected. This is due to the fact that not only are they having to test the network between North America and Japan, but also test their hard drive software package for quality assurance.

We are unsure at this time how this decision is going to affect future Square Enix/Sony relations. But we should be able to tell in the coming days by how Sony reacts to this news. We will have more detailed information on this story as it becomes available.


Happy April Fools day everyone!
(So diabolical aren't we?)