Square’s MMO sequel to Final Fantasy XI has been a monumental failure for the genre, and now Square is going to shut down the piece of crap once and for all. It won’t be forever though, as Square is rebooting the game with Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and to show that the new game is much more than just a patch, they’ll be wiping the original servers. Massively has the exact details from the game’s producer:

“Basically what’s going to happen is that the current story is still continuing now, but some day in the near future — and we’ll make sure we tell the players what day that is — something is going to happen in the story, and at that time, the servers are going to shut down,” Yoshida told us in a group interview this morning at Gamescom.

The reason for the shutdown is less thrilling than you might think. “Basically the player data will be taken over into the new game. So, to convert all this new data for the new systems, we need a certain amount of time to do this. There’s so much data, so many thousands of characters that we must do this for. And so we have to shut down the servers,” he said.

I’m willing to give FFXIV a second chance, and will do so when they release the Realm Reborn version on the PS3. Hopefully it’s playable this time.