Starting with an easy one. “Global Support” was a phrase that came up during the initial press release for PSO2 at the Tokyo Game Show. One of the initial teaser trailers for PSO2 also had English text in it. This has lead people to speculate that this not only means that an English release is going to happen but that also the servers will be global, as in all PSO2 players will be playing to the same schedule and can access the same servers, as people used to be able to with the Dreamcast version of PSO.
Real or Rumour?
As of yet, nothing has actually confirmed wether or not the servers will be regionally split. In fact a western release hasn’t even been announced, nor has there been much of a fuss on Sega of America’s side about PSO2 in general. That said, it’s too early to disregard the possibility of a western release, but I have a feeling that global servers in the way a lot of people interpreted the phrase from the trailer will not come to be.
What we Know
As far as servers go, from the media briefing we know that there will be “World Servers” and that these will operate much in the same way as entrances did for PSU JP. For those outside the Phantasy Star franchise, think seperate realm servers on games like World of Warcraft or Aion, but not like district servers in Guild Wars. The characters you create on a particular world server can only interact with other characters on the same world server, so much like most mmos you will need to decide with your friends which servers to create characters on or else you won’t be able to play with each other. Not without having to create characters from scratch. Sakai has stated that he’s thinking about allowing character transfers but I anticipate that, like World of Warcraft, it will come with a price on the user.
As it is, I somehow doubt that the servers will be truly global, but as it is there is no information to suggest for sure either way. For now, this remains a rumour. As for “Global support” or “Global development”, if that’s referring to a synchronized content schedule for multiple regions of the game then we’ve heard that one before.
PSO2Blog 