Square Enix Will Give Final Fantasy XIV Players Free Game Time

FFXIV producer and director, Naoki Yoshida, also apologized for the long wait times and disconnects

Final Fantasy XIV launched Endwalker, its latest expansion on Friday to all early access purchasers.   Unfortunately, players have struggled to play due to the enormous influx of players, causing frequent disconnects, and long server queues. To compensate players for all this, Square Enix have announced a plan to give all players seven free days of game time.

Endwalker is the latest expansion for FFXIV. Although it doesn't officially come out until December 7, Square Enix began letting players who pre-ordered the expansion play early on December 4. Immediately after the early access launch the servers began to struggle to keep up with the demand as new and old players hopped online simultaneously. This led to long server queues and a lot of frustration for some players. 

In response to this, FFXIV’s Naoki Yoshida, published a blog post apologizing for the “congestion” players encountered over the weekend while explaining Square Enix’s plans moving forward.

“Considering that we are asking players to wait in queues for extremely long periods of time and the ongoing situation making it difficult to play normally,” explained Yoshida in the blog post, “We have decided that during the official release of Endwalker on December 7, we will be granting 7 days of free game time to all players who own the full version of the game and have an active subscription.”

Yoshida confirmed that this compensation gift will be given to anyone currently playing the MMORPG via a free trial that comes with registering the full version of the game and those with multiple accounts. Yoshida also explained that in the future Square Enix might provide more free game time “depending on further developments on the congestion situation.”