Square Enix went deep on Evercold during today’s Fan Festival 2026 keynote in Berlin, detailing the sixth Final Fantasy XIV expansion ahead of its January 2027 launch. The keynote opened with an extended teaser trailer offering a glimpse of the Fourth and the start of the Godless Realms Saga, and producer and director Naoki Yoshida spent the rest of the presentation working through one of the expansion’s new jobs, systems, and raids, plus a Switch 2 release date for the current game.
The expansion’s first new job is Bastion, a main tank that wields a pair of greatshields known as skyltborg, and Yoshida took the stage dressed as the job for the reveal. Bastion starts at Level 90 through a quest in Limsa Lominsa and can grant both itself and party members defensive and curative boons, with a job trailer showing it in action. On the world side, players will spend much of Evercold aboard floating Realmships above the frozen wastes of the Fourth, with the keynote showcasing Naglfar, the Realmship of Water, and the far more industrial Hringhorni, the Realmship of Fire, along with Fargarth, a new city, while concept art teased the remaining vessels.
Evercold is also restructuring how the main scenario plays out. Everyone starts the expansion in the same opening area, but the subsequent story paths can be tackled in any order, and the order won’t change the story or spoil content across branches. To support that freedom, a new Auto Content Balancing system scales difficulty and enemy levels to the party as players run dungeons in their chosen sequence, and Yoshida admitted the system is easier to understand in gameplay than in words. The keynote also recapped the weekly Adventurer Activity reward system first teased in North America, confirmed the new “seasons” terminology simply refers to each batch of two patches with no season passes or extra fees attached, and showed the armory update that copies your best job’s item level onto other max-level jobs.
Personalization is getting a big push as well. Character Action Skins let players assign alternate animations to existing General actions like Teleport and Warp at launch, with job action skins rolling out gradually in later updates, and none of it affects damage output. Character customization is expanding with a new color picker, fine-tuning for features like eyes and lips, eye shadow, face paint layering, and race-specific options such as toggling Lalafell nose spots and adjusting Au Ra horn designs. An auto travel feature that walks your character to the next quest objective was also shown, though it won’t be ready at launch.
On the raid front, Yoshida was joined on stage by Final Fantasy VII Remake series director Naoki Hamaguchi to reveal Beyond the Lifestream, a new eight-player raid series themed around the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy, with the story written by Motomu Toriyama and the FFXIV scenario team under Kazushige Nojima’s supervision. The EVANGELION crossover alliance raid, Ghosts of Desire, received a new teaser trailer and a major addition to its staff, as Mahiro Maeda, a concept artist and designer on Mad Max: Fury Road and a director on EVANGELION: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time, joins as a special guest artist and designer. A new raid difficulty sitting between Normal and Savage was also discussed, comparable to Extreme, rewarding season gear that can be upgraded over time to match Savage-level strength.
We also got some general news on the game as it continues to expand to new platforms. Final Fantasy XIV launches on Switch 2 on August 4, with preorders open now on the Nintendo eShop and an approximately one-month free subscription period to help manage server stability. Same-region player matching expands matchmaking across entire physical data centers starting with Japan in mid-October, chocobo companions are getting overhauled beginning with Patch 8.1, including the ability to bring your chocobo into dungeons, and a Final Fantasy VII-themed typing minigame called Keybound Brawler hits the Gold Saucer on October 28 with support for up to four players. Yoshida also revealed the Evercold Collector’s Bundle, packing an art box, a Reaper figure, an Ethos metal keychain, a Köttr mini plush, and a Tapestry of the Fourth alongside digital items including the Crystal Skyltborg weapon and Vallhallar Odin mount, with preorder details still to come. Before any of that, Patch 7.55 arrives July 28 with new Occult Crescent, Phantom Weapons, Hildibrand, and Allied Society quests.
As someone who really loves Final Fantasy XIV and considers it one of the best games I’ve ever played, I’ll admit I was a little disappointed in Dawntrail, but everything shown today has me really excited for Evercold. Fan Festival 2026 in Berlin runs through Sunday, July 26, with stage content streaming live on Twitch and YouTube.
