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On October 30 2026, Square Enix held a key note with information about the highly anticipated sixth expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, their award-winning MMORPG with 24 million registered players at the Japan Fan Fest 2026. This key note began with an extended opening trailer for the upcoming expansion: Evercold.
Delayed Release Date and Pre-Order Information
After the trailer, producer Naoki Yoshida and translator Koji Fox took to the stage to tragically announce that the expansion will be delayed slightly, with early access now beginning of February 19, 2027 and the full release becoming available on February 23, 2027. Preorders for the expansion will be available for purchase on November 4, 2026.
Those who pre-order the game will receive a Wind-Up Kottr minon and Halone’s Earring.
The collector’s edition of Evercold will come with a statue of the Meteor Survivor in his Reaper job outfit, a keychain of the new cat allied society, and three in-game items:
- Valhallar Odin Mount
- Entreat Crystal Emote
- Crystal Skytlborg
New Job: Zephyr
Today the second new job coming to Evercold was officially revealed after previously being teased at the previous fan fest: Zephyr. Basic information about this job for those interesting in picking it up are as follows
- Role: Physical Ranged DPS
- Battle Mode: Evolved Only
- Main Arm: Crossbow
- Starting LVL: 90
- Starting Location: Gridania
Gameplay wise, Zephyrs work together with a bird companion known as a Nephele to both unleash coordinated attacks and support their party. They will also excel at evasion as the job will have multiple movement related actions
Story Character Information
Information on the various characters that the Warrior of Light will be interacting with during Evercold was given at this fan fest, starting with more information and art being shown of Visna, who resides on the Realmship of Water: Naglfar. Her relationship with the Warrior of Light appears sweet and innocent at first, as seen in the game’s most recent MSQ patch.
Next, more information was revealed about Baldr, the Bastion of the Realmship of Fire: Hringhorni. He is the leader of this realmship or rather, the forreman as each character’s major character’s title is nautical themed to fit with each area being a flying ship.
During the extended trailer, players were introduced to the new character Legerta, whose face will look familar to longtime fans who played through Heavensward. She is the first mate of the Realmship of Water: Naglfar and is known by the title of “Rimeblood”.
New art of Halmarut and Calyx was also shown during the fan fest, with both Yoshida and Koji speaking about how Halmarut’s status as a friend or foe is still up to question and how despite Calyx being a foe in the past, his current form gives him little choice outside of following Halmarut.
New Areas
Multiple new areas that the player will be able to explor in Evercold were shown during the key not. First, viewers were given a walk through of the Realmship of Earth: Sessrymnir. This ship will have a different, less naturalistic feeling than the other as the denizens of this area focus on agriculture and mining, and employ large-scale and complex magic rituals.
Next, the key note shifted to showcasing the Realmship of Wind: Skidbladnir. This realmship is home to the kettir, who excel at building airships.
After those two realmship videos, viewers were then shown a montage of multiple other Evercold areas whose names and purposes have yet to be fully revealed.
Finally, we were given some information on the second town of the expansion: Hjartadunur. Little was revealed about this town aside from the most important piece of information: It will have a jump puzzle harder than the one at Kugane Tower.
New Dungeons
Four Dungeons were shown during a montage during the fan fest.
These dungeons will have many foes such as the one pictured below who made the person typing this sentence scream as neither Yoshida nor Koji Fox addressed it and simply moved on as if nothing happened.
Main Story Progression Changes
As was first mentioned during the Berlin Fan Fest, Evercold’s main scenario quest will be very different from those seen in past expansions. While all players will experience the same “onboarding” quests, they will then have a choice of three different paths that they can complete in any order, visiting areas in potentially a different order from your friends.
In order to account for players unlocking dungeons/trials at different points in time (and thus being at different levels of strength), select parts of Evercol will feature “Auto Content Balancing” This system will scale participants accordingly. Gear will also scale according to this system. No matter which path you choose the game will adjust to be optimal.
Weekly Progression System
As was previously detailed in both the North American and Berlin fan fests, Evercold will be transitioning Final Fantasy XIV’s daily routine systems such as running roulettes into a new weekly system.
Alongside these changes, there will also be a newly updated Adventurer Activity UI. The background will change to reflect the current area that your character is in. According to Yoshida, the development team is working on ways to customize the room you are in.
At the bottom of this UI, there will be a progress bar and rewards which will progress and unlock via completing weekly missions and earning points. These mission will involve trials, crafting, PVP, and more. Standard Missions are repeatable while other missions, such as completing each patch’s MSQ patches will be one time only.
As previously mentioned during the Berlin Fan Fest, every pair of two patches will now be refereed to as a season. This is merely a terminology change and will not come with any extra fees.
Battle System Changes
During the Berlin Fan Fest, it was revealed that the game’s battle system would be split into two modes. Reborn Mode and Evolved Mode. Reborn Mode is the current battle system that all FFXIV players have grown accustomed to while Evolved Mode will be different with “More dynamic actions”.
While there wasn’t much extra info given about Evolved Mode during the key note, viewers were assured that a highly detailed live letter would be coming at a different date.
Character Action Skins were also brought up again. This new system will allow players to customize an action with different animations and effects. A limited number will launch, but will be expanded going forward. During this keynote were were shown pictures of various different teleport animations.
Equipment System Changes
Another change first revealed at Berlin which viewers were reminded of during this key note was the addition of the Item Level Link system. Where any job that the player has at max level can temporarily match the item level of their highest item leveled job in order to run new content without needed to grind for equipment on every job.
A new gear optimization system will also be introduced in Evercold, allowing you to improve gear throughout a season. There will be two different types of gear each with a different route: Seasonal Gear and Raid Gear.
Seasonal Gear can be earned by completing Missions and raising your activity level in the new weekly progression system. At certain milestones, you will earn seasonal gear, such as the accessory pictured below. Unlocking the accessory for one job will also unlock it for all other jobs.
Seasonal gear will be unlocked via this new interface, players will no longer need to talk to specific NPCs in order to obtain a patch’s gear.
This type of gear can also be optimized once per season and is intended for normal players who casually play FInal Fantasy XIV and just want item levels high enough to challenge and complete each patch’s content.
Raid Gear, in contrast, is intended for hardcore players and will be obtained in 8-player Savage Raids. Starting in 8.0, raid coffers will drop for each individual party member at the final floor of each patch’s raid. Everyone gets an item.
Unlike Seasonal Gear, Raid Gear can be optimized twice per season in order to both further increase its item level and unlock slots for advanced materia melding.
Other changes will be coming to the game’s equipment aside from the new Seasonal and Raid Gear systems. Such as a new feature that will allow you to hide parts of the outfit. For example, you can turn off the scarf on the black mage set pictured below or remove the gunbreaker’s spare cartridges.
Character Customization Changes
With the release of 8.0, players will be able to change the color of this eye’s iris and have access to an expanded color picker for eye, hair, and skin tone. There will also be improved customization for eyes and lips as well as the addition of eye shadow and face paint layering.
More character customization options will also be coming with further Evercold patches, but little information was given on them. A new benchmark will allow you to try out the new character customization options that will be available in 8.0. The benchmark will release in early December.
Mount Speed Changes
Three existing mounts will be receiving speed enhancements with the release of Evercold. These mounts are the SDS Fenrir, the Garlond-GL-IS, and the Hardy-Daytona. Owning any of these mounts will increase the speed of all of your owned mounts.
Raid Changes
As revealed in the North American fan fest, a third middle difficulty between savage raids and normal raids: “Fierce”.
As for Alliance Raids, they will be receiving a major revamp in Evercold. According to Yoshida, due to the current Alliance Raid system taking too much time to complete being a demotivating factor for players, each individual Alliance Raid will be split in half as separate duties. Both halves will have their own set of rewards.
There will also be a new Savage Alliance Raid system added to the game starting with the Evangelion Alliance Raids to address complains from players that the difficulty of odd numbered patches was too low. Rewards for these savage raids will include raid gear upgrade materials.
New Battle Content – “Gauntlet of Power”
A new style of battle content titled “Gauntlet of Power” will be added to the game soon. Unlike other content in the game which syncs the player to a lower level to match the dungeon/trial and thus restricts your actions, This new content uses the auto-balancing system so players of higher level will be able to use all of their existing actions.
The Gauntlet of Power is a 4-player dungeon boss rush (Party matching for players level 51 to 110) where you’ll face up to 5 bosses, voting after each battle whether to continue. Over 200 bosses will be selected randomly from the previous expansions’ existing bosses.
Bosses will only be selected from duties all players in the party have completed in order to prevent potential soilers. If one person abandons, the gauntlet will conclude.
The Gauntlet of Power feature will be available at the launch of Evercold and requires the player to have completed the Stormblood expansion in order to unlock. a special item will be needed to unlock materia slots. This item will be obtained via the new Adventurer Activity menu.
Same-Region Player Matching
Development on Same-Region Player Matching is still in progress. North American server testing will begin on November 10 and China server testing will begin on December 1. These implementations will both require a twenty four hour maintenance.
Housing Changes
Starting in 8.1 and through 8.x, housing will be updated along to allow players with an S-sized plot to increase their interior size to that of an L-sized plot. Upgrading the size of your interior will come with a heafty gil cost.
Currently planned for the release of 8.2 (Though not fully guaranteed yet) will be the ability to place specific furniture in mid-air. As usual, the development team also plans to expand the number of available housing plots in the future.
Final Fantasy VII Remake Raids
The Final Fantasy VII Remake Raids will be made with the full support of that game’s development team. The release schedule of the Normal and Savage versions of these raids will be similar to that of previous expansions’ raids, however the Fierce difficulty will be released a week after savage in order to not interfere with world first races and hopefully not spoil players on the contents of Savage.
Evangelion Alliance Raids
A new trailer for Evercold’s upcoming Evangelion Alliance Raids was shown during Fan Fest, narrated by Kotono Mitsuishi, the voice of Misato Katsuragi.
Miscellaneous Updates
Multiple other changes and additions coming with the release of Evercold were mentioned during the keynote, such as:
- Level cap raised to 110.
- Updates to existing battle content.
- New job-specific gear.
- Duty Support will allow multiple players to play content with NPCs
