Final Fantasy XIV is finally getting its free trial back on February 22nd, over two months after Square Enix stopped offering it to reduce player load after the incredibly popular Endwalker expansion. The news comes from FFXIV’s latest Letter from the Producer Livestream from director and producer Naoki Yoshida that took place over the weekend, via NME.
Final Fantasy XIV has a generous free trial option for new players, allowing them to play the entirety of the base A Realm Reborn release and the Heavensward expansion for as long as they’d like. Square Enix’s enthusiastic social media hype for the free trial has even become a meme in its own right.
Endwalker may actually have been too popular when it was first released in December. The trial doesn’t actually include access to the latest expansion. But the game’s servers couldn’t adequately support the combination of people rushing in to play the new content and a fresh wave of new players looking to check out what the hype was all about. Queue lines got so long that Square Enix was forced to both temporarily stop selling the game and get rid of its free trial in an effort to make sure that existing players could get in. And while sales of the game resumed in January, the free trial had still been absent until now.
