Final Fantasy XIV, Square Enix's newest online MMORPG, will continue to be free-to-play until the Japanese company will manage to fix all of its issues and adopt a concrete payment plan for all of the players.
Final Fantasy XIV was officially launched back in September of last year with a free 30-day trial for anyone who wanted to indulge in the new online role-playing game.
Sadly, its debut wasn't without problems, as many players complained of the faulty quest system, lack of high-level content and plenty of glitches encountered throughout the experience.
Square Enix admitted all of these problems and started overhauling over the whole game, while it was kept as
a free-to-play online game.
According to the title's current producer, Naoki Yoshida, Final Fantaxy XIV will continue to be completely free for all players, at least until the company will fix all of the problems and put a concrete payment plan in place.
"It was pretty much personally because I've been a player for so long. I wanted to make sure that I would only ask the player to pay for something" once the team had established a firm plan for improvements, Yoshida tells
Gamasutra.
"The reason we're doing this is we're showing the players, yes, it's still costing us a lot of money, and we're not getting that money back yet, but we're serious about making these changes. This is one of the ways that we can show players that we are serious and we are taking it seriously."
As of yet, the company still can't say for sure when all of the problems are solved and players are asked to pay subscriptions, as the team still has plenty of things to resolve until it can start thinking of ways of charging money from gamers.
Yoshida emphasizes that not a lot of companies would have been able to keep the online game available and free-to-play while it made the modifications, saying "It's because Square Enix is funding this project 100 percent. That's why we can do this. Only Square Enix can do something like this."
Are you still playing Final Fantasy XIV or are you just waiting until the Japanese developer solves all the problems and then give it another chance?
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