Lately there have been quite a few rumors on the internet stating that Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is scheduled for release next summer. Those rumors have been introduced as fact by a couple prominent press sites, causing quite a bit of confusion.

They seem to have stemmed from a thread on NeoGaf reporting tweets by a Polish twitter user that stated to have "internal contacts" at Square Enix, and also included the fairly ludicrous notion that the whole team from Final Fantasy Versus XIII had been shifted to work on A Realm Reborn (talk about credibility here...).

Those rumors are quite premature, as the release window for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is, for the moment, not set in stone.

Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida has been granting quite a few interviews to the Japanese press, and in one of them (published yesterday by Game Watch) we can find some rather clear information about this issue:

The official service is going to start next spring or next summer. That's unpredictable. It's going to depend a lot on the feedback coming from the beta test.

So, while summer is a possibility, it's definitely not a certainty as some would lead us to believe. Spring is also possible depending on how the beta version of the game will perform.

At the moment the only officially confirmed dates are November the 28th for the beginning of the global Alpha, and "between the end of January and the beginning of February" for the beginning of the beta. Everything else is rumor and speculation, and according to what Yoshida himself says, premature speculation at that, considering that no one can predict how the beta will go.

We do know that, at least according to Yoshida in the same interview, Alpha testing is going smoothly, with feedback from testers looking even more positive than what he expected. Whether that means that we'll see A Realm Reborn released earlier rather than later, we obviously don't know. We'll have to stand by for an official release date instead of believing the first rumor coming from the net we come across.

In the meanwhile you can calm your eagerness with a nice recap of the Final Fantasy XIV story to prepare yourself for A Realm Reborn by checking out my The Story So Far weekly column.