Square Enix reward Final Fantasy XIV players with 'Legacy' bonuses

Square Enix have announced two new initiatives for Final Fantasy XIV titled 'Legacy' and 'Welcome Back.'

'Legacy' aims to reward long-time players who stuck through the game past its disasterous launch with a cut subscription fee and the ability to play multiple characters on a single world.

Anyone who has subscribed for more than 90 days from January 6th 2012 until beta testing of the game's version 2.0 will get themselves in on the program.

Legacy players will be able to have eight characters on each world, making for a total of 40 playable characters. The subscription will cost them £6.89/€9.99/$9.99 a month, a discount of around €3/$5 on the equivalent package which allows a similar amount of characters.

The current membership tiers will remain, but 'Legacy' will become an exclusive top level of membership.

Legacy players will also be lucky enough to get an exclusive Chocobo mount when Version 2.0 launches later this year. Most impressive of all, Square Enix is taking the unprecedented step of placing the names of Legacy players into the credits of the final version of 2.0, which presumably will also include the PS3 version of the game.

The 'Welcome Back' campaign is meanwhile designed to entice players with inactive accounts back to the game. It's a 10-day trial between May 10th and May 21st and will be offered to players who haven't played in some time.

Players returning during the trial will get to experience the content of recent patches, which has been massively transformative to Final Fantasy XIV as a whole.

 Final Fantasy XIV has arguably been the most troubled title in the series to date. The game had a poor launch and was described as leaving the Final Fantasy brand "greatly damaged" by Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada. Major development heads were removed from the game, and since then new Producer Naoki Yoshida has been fighting the fires to get the game back on track.

We had an epic two-part, two-hour sit-down with Yoshida back in October last year where he laid out his plans and vision for the future of the game. We left his chat impressed, and would highly suggest reading it.