Final Fantasy 14 players will get between 2 to 10 extra days of free gameplay time for myriad reasons, as announced on the Lodestone last night. It seems to be a mix of addressing major issues for console players and thanking players for patience during a time of major activity.
The Xbox client, which launched earlier this year, sees the most pressing issues in this new launch. As described earlier by Yoshida, the Xbox players have problems when loading between areas due to “memory fragmentation,” and the team has marked this as a high-priority issue.
Meanwhile on the Playstation, there were issues involving the PS Store’s lockout times. Some players wouldn’t be able to boot up the client, as the store would lock them out until the Dawntrail release time on July 2, forcing them to download the PS4 client instead of the PS5.
However, as a likely justification to extend this to all players, Yoshida thanked all players for cooperating with the expansion launch’s implemented server changes, which restricted most Western players from moving between its primarily-utilized Data Centers and Worlds and has stopped character creation on those same servers.
All players with a non-trial “full” version of Final Fantasy 14, including Playstation, PC, and Xbox players, will see 2 days of free gameplay time, kicking off on July 10 at 10:30 p.m. PDT.
Most likely due to the severity and ongoing nature of Xbox players’ issues, Xbox players will receive 8 days of free gameplay time, which will take place from July 10 at 10:30 p.m. PDT. This is on top of the 2 extra days, bringing Xbox players’ time up to 10 days total.
These free days will only apply to players who have an active subscription as of July 4 at 10:30 p.m. PDT, and will include a free retainer usage period; the update states it’ll take 2-3 days to implement for everyone. Players who see this and subscribe to try to earn the free time won’t be able to utilize that extra time, nor will free trial players (as they aren’t paying anyway).
At this point, a few extra days of playtime should just be a tradition and a thank-you for logging in within the first week of official launch, but that may not be pro-business. At least it’s not because of massive server issues like those seen during Endwalker’s launch.
