FFXIV Free Trial Guide: What Is Included and How Far It Goes

The FFXIV free trial got a lot bigger with Patch 7.5. It used to be the base game plus two expansions, and now it is the base game plus three, running all the way through Shadowbringers with a level cap of 80. There is no time limit on it, and no credit card needed to sign up. You can play for weeks, hit the level cap on a bunch of jobs, finish one of the best stories the series has ever told, and never spend a dime.

The catch is a set of social and money limits that nudge you toward paying once you are hooked. Most of them are easy to live with, a couple are a genuine pain, and none of them stop you from finishing the story. Here is what is actually in the trial, what gets in your way, and where the story cuts off.

What the Free Trial Includes

The short version is you get the base game, A Realm Reborn, plus three full expansions: Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers. There is no playtime cap on any of it. Every job in those expansions is open to you, and you can push every single one to level 80, including all eight crafters and all three gatherers.

Content and expansions

You are looking at roughly four games worth of story, zones, and dungeons. The base game sets everything up and walks you through the politics of three city-states. Heavensward drags you into a thousand-year war with dragons. Stormblood splits the story into two fronts, one at Ala Mhigo and one at Doma. Then Shadowbringers drops you into a parallel world that is slowly being swallowed by light.

That last one is the addition that came with Patch 7.5, and it is the expansion most fans call the high point of the whole game. Getting it for free is a genuinely big deal.

There is no clock on any of this. You can log in today, take six months off, come back, and pick up right where you left off. A lot of trial players end up treating it like a single-player RPG that just happens to have other people running around in it.

Jobs you can play

Pretty much everything released through Shadowbringers is fair game.

• Tanks: Paladin, Warrior, Dark Knight, and now Gunbreaker
• Healers: White Mage, Scholar, Astrologian
• Melee damage: Dragoon, Monk, Ninja, Samurai
• Physical ranged: Bard, Machinist, and now Dancer
• Magic damage: Black Mage, Summoner, Red Mage
• Plus Blue Mage, the oddball "limited job" that learns its spells straight from enemies

Gunbreaker and Dancer are the two that opened up when Shadowbringers joined the trial. You also get the Hrothgar and Viera races if you want a different look for your character. The jobs you can not touch yet are Reaper and Sage (those arrived with Endwalker) and Viper and Pictomancer (those came with Dawntrail). Those expansions are not in the trial.

Stuff to do

The main story quest is the spine of the whole experience, and it gates almost everything else, so a lot of your time goes there. Beyond that you have got dungeons, trials, and raids, the deep dungeon called Palace of the Dead, hunts, relic weapon quests, the Gold Saucer with its Triple Triad and chocobo racing, plus all the crafting and gathering you can stomach. There is a ton of side content to poke at.

The one big "no" is Ultimate raids. Those hardest-in-the-game fights stay locked behind a paid sub. Savage raids, on the other hand, are technically open to you if you are into that kind of punishment.

One feature quietly makes the whole trial playable: Duty Support and the Trust system let you bring a party of NPCs into your story dungeons, and Trust does the same for the level 71 and up Shadowbringers dungeons. So even though you can not build your own group, you never get stuck waiting on real people just to finish the story.

The Restrictions That Actually Matter

The trial's limits are real, but they aim at specific things, mostly the in-game economy and talking to strangers. Here is what you are actually working around.

Money and the market

The big one is a 300,000 gil cap. Any gil you earn past that line just gets deleted, so you can not let it pile up. On top of that:

• No access to the market board, so you can not buy from or sell to other players
• No trading with other players, full stop
• No retainers, which are the NPC storage and sales helpers that everyone else leans on

This sounds rougher than it is in practice. You can still gear up from NPC vendors, dungeon drops, Grand Company seals, and your own crafting. You just can not play the auction-house game or stockpile millions for later.

Chat and social

This is where it pinches more. You can not use shout, yell, or tell, which are the channels that reach people you do not already know. That means no whispering a friend you met, and no calling out in a city for help with a quest.

You can still talk in party chat if someone invites you to a group. You can talk in a linkshell or cross-world linkshell if someone pulls you in. You can read Free Company chat in theory, except you can not actually join a Free Company at all. You also can not start your own parties or linkshells. You can only join the ones other people drag you into.

The fix most players land on is simple: do your planning in Discord or some other chat app outside the game, then use the in-game tools once you are grouped up. The Novice Network is open to you too, if a mentor invites you. It is the closest thing trial players get to a general chat, and it is a good place to ask dumb questions without judgment.

Other limits worth knowing

• One character per World, up to eight characters total across a data center
• No PvP of any kind, including Frontline, Crystalline Conflict, and Rival Wings
• No Ultimate raids
• You can log into the Lodestone but can not post, and the official forums and the Companion phone app are off limits
• If there is a login queue, paying players cut ahead of you

The restriction that catches people off guard is the permanent one. The moment you buy the game or start a subscription, you can never go back to the trial, even if you barely played past what the trial already gives you. So it pays to milk the trial for everything it is worth before you upgrade.

How Far the Story Goes on Trial

This is the part that tends to surprise people. The trial is not a chopped-up demo. It is a complete, hundred-plus-hour story that runs all the way to the end of Shadowbringers, patch 5.58. That is the base game plus three full expansions of main scenario, and it stops right before Endwalker begins.

The shape of the story

It starts slow. A Realm Reborn front-loads a lot of fetch quests and political setup, and the patch content that bridges the base game into Heavensward is famously long. A lot of new players bounce off right here. The pacing complaint is so common that "it gets better at Heavensward" became a running joke in the community. The funny part is, the trial now hands you exactly the stretch everyone tells you to push toward.

Heavensward is where the writing tightens up. You get a dragon war, a church sitting on a pile of secrets, and real stakes for the characters you have been traveling with. Stormblood runs two storylines at once across Ala Mhigo and Doma, which some people love for the variety and others find a little scattershot. Then Shadowbringers lands, and for a whole lot of players it is the best the story ever gets, a darker and more focused arc with a genuinely great villain.

Where it actually stops

You play through to the final cutscene of patch 5.58. That is a real ending too, not a cheap cliffhanger. Shadowbringers wraps up its main thread in a satisfying way, even though Endwalker picks up the bigger plot right after. So you walk away with a complete arc, not a story sawed off mid-sentence.

How long that takes

It is hard to pin down because everyone reads at a different speed and skips cutscenes differently, but a first-timer doing the story with normal side dabbling is usually looking at somewhere north of 200 hours to clear the whole thing. Speed-runners do it faster, and completionists take way longer. The point is, there is no hurry, because there is no timer breathing down your neck.

Making the Most of Trial Limitations

A few habits make the trial a lot smoother. None of these are secrets, but they are easy to miss when you are just starting out.

Handle gil before it vanishes

Since anything over 300k just disappears, get into the habit of spending down before you cross the line. Teleport fees quietly eat gil over time, so traveling around helps bleed off the extra. Buy gear from NPC vendors when yours falls behind, stock up on the consumables you actually use, and pour surplus into the Grand Company for seals. And since you can not trade with other players, anything you do not want just goes to an NPC vendor. Do not hold onto drops hoping to sell them to another player later, because that door is closed.

Gear up without the market board

With the market board off limits, you lean on other sources instead.

• NPC vendors in every city sell perfectly fine leveling gear
• Dungeons drop gear as you run them, often the stuff you actually need
• Grand Company quartermasters take seals in exchange for solid gear
• Crafting your own is fully on the table if that is your thing

You will not have perfect gear this way, but you will be plenty equipped for everything the trial throws at you, including the Shadowbringers content near the end.

Talk around the chat wall

Plan your group stuff out of game. Hop on Discord with whoever you are playing with, agree on what you are running, then use the in-game Duty Finder to get matched up. That part works fine, because you can be pulled into parties even though you can not start them yourself. And try to grab a Novice Network invite from a mentor early. It is the closest thing trial players get to a general chat for asking questions.

Run story dungeons with NPCs

This is the single feature that saves the trial. Duty Support fills your story dungeons with NPC party members, and the Trust system does the same for the level 71 and up Shadowbringers dungeons. You never have to wait on a tank or a healer, you never have to talk to anyone, and you can take the story at your own pace. For a trial player who can not assemble parties, it is the difference between smooth progress and getting stuck on a required dungeon.

Manage inventory without retainers

No retainers means your storage is your inventory, the armory chest, the chocobo saddlebag, and the glamour dresser. Be ruthless about what you keep. Vendor the gear you will not use, dump crafting materials into the saddlebag, and feed glamours into the dresser instead of holding the bulky gear itself. It fills up faster than you would think, and there is no retainer attic to offload the overflow onto.

When It Is Worth Subscribing

The trial is generous enough that you might not need to pay for a long, long time. So when does it actually make sense to pull the trigger?

You want the rest of the story

The cleanest reason: you finished Shadowbringers and you need to know what happens next. Endwalker and Dawntrail are not in the trial, and the story keeps going hard into both of them. If you are hooked on the plot, that is your sign.

You want the newer jobs and races

Reaper and Sage came with Endwalker. Viper and Pictomancer came with Dawntrail. None of them are available on the trial. The same goes for the male Viera option that Endwalker added and the female Hrothgar that Dawntrail introduced. If one of those is calling your name, you will need to upgrade to reach it.

You want to play with people properly

If your friends are in a Free Company, or you want to lead parties, sell your crafts on the market board, do PvP, or chase Ultimate raids, the trial is going to keep blocking you. Subscribing lifts all the social and economy limits at once, which is the whole point of paying.

What it costs

A subscription runs about $12.99 a month on the Entry tier, which gives you one character per World and up to eight total. Standard is about $14.99 a month, bumps you to more characters per World, and throws in cheaper rates if you buy multiple months at once. You also need to own the game itself. Here is the key distinction after Patch 7.5.

• Starter Edition covers the exact same content as the trial, the base game plus Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers. It just removes all the restrictions and tosses in 30 free days of play time.
• Complete Edition adds Endwalker and Dawntrail on top of that, which is what you want if you are ready for everything the game has to offer.

So if you only want to shed the limits but keep playing the same content you already have, Starter does the job. If you want the newer expansions, go Complete.

Everything carries over

Whatever you leveled, whatever gear you earned, whatever story progress you made. It all transfers the moment you upgrade. You are not starting fresh. You are just unlocking the doors that were closed. There is zero downside to riding the trial until you genuinely bump into a wall you care about. A lot of players do not pay a cent until they have cleared Shadowbringers, and that is a perfectly smart way to do it, because by then you know for sure the game is worth your money.