Final Fantasy 14's free trial is massive—so massive, in fact, that it's become a bit of a copy/pasted meme over the years. The sentence "have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14" is burned into our brains.
And, to be fair, it's a bloody huge one, currently letting you play for free for as long as you want right until the end of Shadowbringers (with some big limitations, mind). Still, it's a few hundred hours without a single monthly sub payment. Well, Final Fantasy 11's gonna be following in those footsteps, per the FF11 site:
"We're removing the play time limit for the FINAL FANTASY XI Free Trial version and increasing its character level cap to Level 75!
Time limit: 14 days > No restrictions … Character level cap: Level 50 > Level 75."
The site also mentions that previously-created trial characters will also be able to once again play the game, so if you started a free trial and ran out of game time, you can hop back in.
That's a pretty huge bump—especially since it also lets players do some of the "Limit Break" quests. For context, while FF11 technically caps out at level 50, players can up that to a maximum of 99 by doing a certain questline every few levels. And they'll have all the time in the world to do it in, hooray!
Honestly, this now makes two of Square's premier MMOs very generous—and as a fan of the genre writ large, I'm happy to see genuine efforts made to keep old dogs like FF11, which is doing pleasantly well, alive and kicking. There's a dearth of new MMOs out there, so I'm just glad to see efforts to maintain the old ones.
To great effect, mind. Back in March, FF11 was getting so many new players it had to pause character creation on its busiest server for a while and, checking this auction house database, the game still has around 88,000 active players.
