Final Fantasy XIV: Evercold Keynote Reveals More Details; Release Set for February

Square Enix opened its Tokyo Final Fantasy XIV Fan Fest event this weekend with a keynote presentation dedicated to the MMORPG’s latest expansion, Final Fantasy XIV: Evercold. The keynote, presented as usual by Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida alongside with Translation Supervisor Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, provided plenty of extra details about the new content and changes coming in the expansion. It also revealed that its release date has been pushed back slightly to February 23, 2027, with pre-order early access beginning on February 19, 2027. Pre-orders, including its Collector’s Edition, will begin on November 4, 2026.

Evercold continues the “Godless Realms Saga” that began with the events of Dawntrail. Similar to Shadowbringers‘ the First, Evercold takes players to the realm known as the Fourth, a reflection of Hydaelyn that has fallen to ruin and is succumbing to encroaching ice. As a result, its people have moved to the skies, living over the last five centuries upon five great airships known as Realmships, where they are branded and endure lives of hardship. However, the Fourth — which draws heavily on Norse mythology — faces a new threat, with the Warrior of Light required to travel to it, becoming the “Far Wanderer” and a beacon of hope for the people.

 

 

As previously announced, Evercold will introduce two new Jobs to the game, with the first, the tank Bastion, detailed during the Berlin Fan Fest. The second new Job is the ranged DPS Zephyr, which uses a crossbow and an arcane avian companion known as a Nephele to provide powerful coordinated attacks and party support. Like the Bastion, it will only use the new Evolved battle mode and will start at level 90; its Job unlock quest can be found in Gridania. It is built to be mobile, and has a variety of special movement actions.

Some of the main characters in the expansion were also revealed. Fellow Scions of the Seventh Dawn Alpinaud and Estinien will play major roles as they travel to the Fourth with the Warrior of Light. Visna is a Zephyr players will have already met in the latest main story update, and resides on Naglfar, the Realmship of Water, while Baldr is a Bastion and the leader of Hringhorni, Realmship of Fire. Lagertha is another new character, but bears a striking resemblance to a previous character in the game and is the First Mate of Naglfar. The expansion will also heavily involve Halmarut and Calyx, who appeared in the post-Dawntrail update series.

 

 

The keynote included looks at additional locations in the game. Joining Naglfar and Hringhorni are two other Realmships: the Realmship of Earth, Sessrymnir, and the Realmship of Wind, Skiðblaðnir. Sessrymnir has a different feel to Hringhorni, with its people focusing the Ark Crystal’s energy into agriculture and mining, as well as employing large-scale magic rituals. Meanwhile, Skiðblaðnir has an arctic tundra feel and incorporates wind into everyday life, with its people — including the catlike Köttr — excelling at airship building. A new video also showcased a mixture of additional locales, while Evercold’s second town was revealed to be Hjartadunur. Both player towns will include jump puzzles, which are noted to be notably more challenging than those in Dawntrail. The Köttr will also be joined by another friendly race, the mechanical Fylgjur.

The presentation also revisited the new main story progression changes for Evercold. rather than being fully linear, Square Enix is planning to open up the expansion’s main story to allow players to progress select parts in an order of their choosing following the initial onboard quests. For example, in previous expansion stories all players would begin in Area A before moving through Areas B, C, and D in that order. However, Evercold will permit players to progress through those areas in whichever order before moving onto the next act. To account for this, the expansion will feature automatic difficulty and level balancing for the fields and dungeons impacted, as well as adjusting quest rewards.

The presentation also showed a refreshed look at the new Adventure Activity UI, which aims to move away from the current daily-based timing and reward system for content, like the Duty Roulette, to a weekly-based system. This system will give players missions or duties to let them engage with different parts of the game and reward them with Activity Points, which can be used to unlock gear and other rewards. The UI shows the area players are currently in, while the development team is looking for ways to make the room customisable.

 

 

The number in the bottom left shows the player’s current Activity Level, with the ribbon next to it showing the rewards available for that level. As players earn Activity Points, they unlock rewards and raise their Activity Level. Activity Points are obtained by completing various missions, which cover quests, battling, gathering, crafting, PvP, and more. They are split into repeatable standard missions and weekly missions, with players are able to focus fully on the content that they prefer. There is a limit to the number of points available in a week; however, is players do not gain all the points in one week, after obtaining the points from a subsequent week they can go back and earn missing points from previous ones.

The keynote also reiterated some of the previous Fan Fest keynotes in Los Angeles and Berlin. Seasons largely acts as a recategorisation of the current system of post-launch patches. Each season is effectively the equivalent of an even and odd patch from the previous system; for example, Patch 7.2 and Patch 7.3 constitute a single season, so Evercold and its following major patch will be the first season. There will also be a new Job Action system for the game’s combat, which features Reborn Mode (current) and Evolved Mode (new). A special Letter from the Producer Live will provide full details about the combat changes at a later date. The game’s armoury system will receive a significant update, with the game’s current system of players needing to raise the Item Levels for each Job being replaced. Players will still need to level up jobs, but the new system will let players “reflect” the Item Level of their highest gear to other Jobs (not including elements like materia), allowing them to potentially run content in other Jobs without needing to spend longer getting their gear up to scratch.

Evercold will also introduce Character Action Skins, which let players unlock action animations — teleporting, emotes, etc. — that let them further customise their characters. Players can acquire new variant animations that they can assign for their character as rewards. Other expanded character customisation options to be included at launch for Evercold include a colour picker for eye, hair, and skin tones; improved eye and lip customisation; and face paint layering, plus the option to toggle certain parts of individual gear pieces on or off. There will also be additional race-specific options introduced from Patch 8.1. New character creation options will be available in a new benchmark tool, currently slated for release in December and preceded by a Letter from the Producer Live focusing on the new options. Final Fantasy XIV’s public fields are planned to receive content updates in post-release updates, expanding special content like that found in Eureka into regular zones, with more details to be revealed at a later date, with other quality-of-life improvements also planned.

 

 

 

Evercold will introduce a new third difficulty for eight-person Raids that will sit between the current Normal and Savage difficulties. Intended to act as a stepping stone between them, this difficulty has been named Fierce, but players will not need to complete Fierce to take on Savage difficulty. In addition, twenty-four-player Alliance Raids are getting revamped progression routes. Previously, players would go in a four-time repeated sequence of regular monsters followed by a boss fight, with the time commitment becoming too extensive for the rewards. Alliance Raids will now be split into two parts, acting as separate duties. In addition, the raid reward system will be changed, with more details to be revealed later. In addition, Alliance Raids will also receive special Savage versions. These are redesigned high difficulty eight-player versions focusing on bosses from the regular Alliance Raids, featuring two unique battle stages, and will reward players with raid gear upgrade materials.

Other new battle content is called the Gauntlet of Power. It is a four-player dungeon boss rush allowing a party of different levels to play together. Rather than the previous level sync system, it will use the new auto-balancing system where players remain at their current levels, but damage dealt to and by the enemy is balanced for each party member. Players face up to five bosses randomly selected from over two hundred available, voting whether or not to continue after each battle. It is available for players between level 51 and 110 and will allow players to level up sub-jobs, earn Activity Points, and more.

 

 

There will be some changes to the process of gear optimisation, or improving gear within each season. There are two types of gear, each with their own optimisation route: seasonal gear is obtained by playing the game and raising one’s Activity Level, while raid gear is obtained from eight-player Savage-difficulty raids, with raid coffers now being dropped for each member. Season gear comes with two materia slots, and its item level can be raised once during a season by obtaining the required optimisation items. In a even-numbered patch, these can be found from Fierce-difficulty eight-player raids, while in an odd-numbered patch they can also be found in the patch’s new Trial.

Meanwhile, raid gear will allow players to adjust the secondary attributes of all parts, but does not immediately come with materia slots. Materia slots can instead be unlocked using special items obtained as Activity Level rewards, which unlocks three slots for advanced materia melding. Raid item gear and have its item level increased twice, the first using the same exchange items used to obtain it and the second from optimisation items obtained in the eight-player Savage-difficulty Alliance raids plus special crafted materials.

 

 

In addition, the game’s Duty Support system — which lets players take on dungeons and Trials with NPC party members — will also receive an update. Previously solo only, players will now able to use the Duty Support system with a partial party. An overhaul of the game’s Chocobo companion with also start with Patch 8.1. It will let players bring Chocobo companions into instanced dungeons, with light parties of two players and two Chocobo, as well as overhaul the Chocobo breeding system, and more. In addition, PvP is planned to receive a major update in Patch 8.1, including a PvP Hall of the Novice, a large-scale content update, and various system updates.

There will be some significant player housing updates, also starting with Patch 8.1. First, players will be able to customise the interior size of their housing, such as using L-size floorplans within an S-sized house. There will also be a new interface, which will allow mid-air placement of furnishing. In addition, more plots will be made available for players, though a final decision on the implementation has not been made yet.

There was also a quick reminder of the game’s new eight-player Raid series, titled “Beyond the Lifestream”. As the title suggests, it is a collaboration with Final Fantasy VII, with its story created by Motomu Toriyama and the Final Fantasy XIV scenario team, with Kazushiga Nojima acting as story supervisor and Tetsuya Nomura acting as art design supervision. The normal version of the first tier, Fated Collision, will release in Patch 8.01, with the Savage version arriving in Patch 8.05 and the Fierce version arriving one week after the Savage version. Finally, there is a small update for the new twenty-four-player Alliance Raid, a crossover with Evangelion titled “Ghosts of Desire”, with a new teaser video.