That’s a hell of a game of catch-up. Today, the team at Sega released its full content plans for the North American edition of Phantasy Star Online 2. Considering just how old the game actually is, it’s kind of scary to consider just how long we might have to wait to catch up with Japan. Luckily, it won’t be much of a wait at all. In the PSO2 2020 roadmap, we can see that Sega plans to roll out roughly eight years of content by the end of this one. Gotta go fast.
Right now, the launch version of Phantasy Star Online 2 goes up to the original game’s “Episode 3.” In Japan, Episode 3 launched in 2014, two years after the original launch. That’s already a pretty good start, and that includes all the current balance and game tweaks to date. As we saw during today’s IGN Expo, Episode 4 will be arriving in August 2020. That will come with crafting, new story content, new quests, and a level cap boost from 75 to 80.
Episode 5 is currently planned to follow Episode 4 in Q3 2020, with Episode 6 arriving in Q4. Episode 6 was a 2019 release in Japan, so by the end of this year we’ll almost be caught up! Sega plans to eventually get the playerbases at content parity, but can’t provide any timing for that due to the pandemic situation. The PSO 2 2020 roadmap is quite a fast track through nearly a decade of MMO endgame content refreshes, but I’m sure you folks can handle it.
Phantasy Star Online 2 is available for the Xbox One and the PC via Windows 10. Other PC platforms will see the game at a later date.
