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On April 24 2026, Square Enix officially revealed the highly anticipated sixth expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, their award-winning MMORPG with 24 million registered players at the North American Fan Fest 2026. This new expansion will be titled Evercold and will revolve around another Shard of Final Fantasy XIV’s universe and an ever-expanding frost.
This new expansion will be the start of what Final Fantasy XIV director referred to during the keynote as the Godless Realms Saga. This new saga will see the Warrior of Light visit the shard known as The Fourth, similar to how Shadowbringers had players visit The First. Similar to The First, this Shard has fallen to a calamity.
Several pieces of art depicting multiple areas that players will visit in The Fourth were shown, with many of them featuring locations that either overlook the ocean or have water-related structures. There was also a barren settlement and one filled with airships on display.
After showcasing the areas, Yoshi-P talked about how The Fourth is not a world without danger, as the world has several large giants. Details about these creatures were not revealed during the keynote. Players were also given a glimpse of a new race of friendly cat creatures that they will be encountering in The Fourth alongside these giants.
After speaking about The Fourth, the Key Note’s focus switched to various gameplay changes that Final Fantasy XIV fans can expect in Evercold. As they showed off a new Adventurer Activity UI, Yoshi-P talked about how the game’s roulette system would be switching from a daily reward system to a weekly reward system in order to change how players grind though the game and prevent the system of grinding 450 tomestones a week from becoming stale.
This new UI, which is still early in development and subject to change, will give players various missions to complete in order to earn Activity Points and rewards. If a player is unable to to complete all their weekly missions, they may save them for completion on another week on the condition that you must complete your current week’s challenges to do the prior week’s missions
Another detail from the keynote is that some of Final Fantasy XIV’s release terminology will be changing. The game will now be referring to every two patch post-expansion cycle as a “Season”. It is currently unknown if this will have any effect on gameplay, though the current Item lvl progression will remain the same under this new terminology.
Another major gameplay change will effect the game’s equipment and armory systems, as with the release of Evercold players will be able to “reflect” the item level of their best job onto jobs they haven’t grinded equipment for, allowing players to try new content with a variety of jobs without needing to grind or purchase new equipment
The game’s character creation system will be receiving a variety of updates as well. In the future the game will be gaining
- A color picker for eye, hair and skin tone
- Improved customization of eyes & lips, addition of eye shadow and face paint layering
- The option to turn off specific parts of individual gear pieces
- A new customization system called “Character Action Skins” where players will be able to customize their job actions will be added, however information of this system will not be revealed until Berlin’s Fan Fest key note.
The game’s raid systems and difficulty will also be changing in the future, with a new difficulty level coming to the game’s 8-person raids. This difficulty level will not be more difficulty than Savage Raids but rather a middle ground between the normal difficulty and savage. More info will be revealed during the Berlin keynote.
In addition to this, a change to the progression of Alliance Raids will be implemented to address how they can be seen as a “time sink” for players. Little detail was given about this (However it was clarified that Alliance Raids will not be shortened), with more information to come at the Japanese Fan Fest keynote.
On the topic of raids, it was also revealed that the method of matching with other players for duties will be changed before the release of Evercold. From now on, players will be able to perform duties with players in any data center as long as they are in the same region. This will prevent players from flooding data center travel in order to travel to Aether for raids
While the new jobs players can expect to play as in Evercold won’t be revealed until the Berlin keynote, it has been confirmed that the game will be adding a new Tank Job as well as a Physical-Ranged DPS job. These new jobs will be Final Fantasy XIV original and not pulled from any prior Final Fantasy game. Despite not having any information on new jobs, Yoshi-P did detail the ways that existing jobs will be changed.
The 21 main jobs of Final Fantasy XIV (Blue Mage and Beastmaster will be excluded), will be recieving a new system where players will be able to choose between playing them in Reborn Mode or Evolved Mode. Reborn Mode will have job action rotations work the same way they have since A Realm Reborn while Evolved Mode will feature a new rotation that will focus on less keystrokes and put a bigger focus on that job’s individuality.
This new system was compared to Street Fighter 6’s “Classic” and “Modern” controls by Yoshi-P during the keynote, with Yoshi-P stating that it won’t be simplifying the game like that. While all of the game’s current jobs will be updated with this new system, all future jobs will only have an Evolved Mode version.
Before closing off the keynote, several other Evercold additions were mentioned with little elaboration
- Level Cap will be increased from Lvl 100 to Lvl 110
- Treasure Hunts, FATEs, and Hunts will return. However, they may be changed to be larger and more dynamic
- New Instanced Dungeons. Yoshi-P made several jokes about the lack of ice in them
- New job gear
- A new 8-Player Raid series, with details to be revealed at the Berlin keynote
- A new Duty Support system where the player can team up with NPCs, more details to be revealed in Berlin
By far the biggest announcement though was the theme of the expansion’s Alliance Raids. It was announced that all three tiers of Evercold’s Alliance Raids will be themed around the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. The raid will be titled Final Fantasy XIV: Evangelion – Ghosts of Desire
Evercold is currently scheduled to release in the January of 2027, nine months after Final Fantasy XIV’s 7.5 patch. During Fan Fest, a trailer featuring a shorter version of this expansion’s opening sequence was unveiled.
Final Fantasy XIV is currently available to play on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The game allows new players to participate in a free trial that includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn and award-winning expansions Heavensward and Stormblood, allowing them to play up to Lvl 70 quests. This Free-Trial will also be updated to include Shadowbringers next week.
