23 years after launch, Final Fantasy 11 is suspending character creation on its most popular server as it buckles beneath the weight of player congestion

I played Final Fantasy 11 for the first time in 2024 after an episode of the Abnormal Mapping podcast poisoned me with brainworms hungry for an MMO that, since its launch in 2002, has been left largely untouched by the genre conventions World of Warcraft would formalize in the years that followed. It's like an interactive museum of an alternate MMO history, and there's apparently no shortage of other players drawn in by that siren call.

More than two decades after FF11's launch, Square Enix...