‘Final Fantasy 14’ will reopen free trials next week

Square Enix has confirmed that free trials for the critically acclaimed MMO Final Fantasy 14, will reopen next week.

During the latest Letter from the Producer Livestream (February 19), director and producer, Naoki Yoshida, and his team confirmed that free trials for the MMO will be open to the public once again on February 22.

Following the launch of the latest Endwalker expansion in December 2021, free trials for Final Fantasy 14 were halted due to heavy server congestion. At the time, the game was receiving an overwhelming amount of new players trying to sign up to the game, while others had to suffer long queue times and multiple errors that would kick them from the MMO.

A temporary suspension of game sales, which have since been reinstated, were implemented, along with a suspension on new registrations for the free trial in order to remove pressure from the servers.

Additionally, Yoshida provided more information for the Steam account linking that was announced earlier this month. It was explained that Final Fantasy 14 Steam players will soon be required to link their Square Enix account in order to play (or continue playing) the game.

The small update won’t be region-locked and is part of the “ongoing efforts to further enhance account security and bolster fraud prevention measures.”

According to a Square Enix statement obtained by FanByte, “For existing users, we understand that there may be cases where the country information in the Steam account provided by Valve does not perfectly match the country/region information of the Square Enix account. Therefore, we have not set restrictions that would impede pre-existing users who wish to link their accounts.”

During the same broadcast, Yoshida and his team also revealed that Final Fantasy 14 will be getting its first graphical update alongside patch 7.0.