As is tradition, the upcoming expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was announced during the keynote presentation of the North American Fan Festival, taking place this year in Anaheim, California. Colloquially known as “8.0” until now, the expansion finally has a name: Evercold. Here’s everything we learned during the keynote about what we can expect when Patch 8.0 drops in January 2027.
As a note, details about new playable jobs are typically reserved for the European and Japanese Fan Festival, so that information was not divulged here, but stay tuned over the rest of the year as both job final details and new specific information are revealed.
The last Fanfest cycle also featured the announcement that the game was coming to Xbox consoles, and the keynote closed with the reveal of a Switch 2 version. There will be a month-long Early Access period prior to the official launch, but this period will be free to access. However, the Switch 2 version of the game will require a separate subscription fee due to Nintendo’s internal policies, unlike the other console versions. Nintendo Switch Online will not be required, and players with an active subscription on another platform will receive a 50% discount on the Switch 2 subscription fee.
The story arc from the post-Endwalker patch quests, which continued in Dawntrail and is now going further in Evercold, now has an official name: “The Godless Realms Saga”. The story will take the Warrior of Light into the Fourth reflection, similar to Shadowbringers‘ setting in the First. The Fourth is a “fallen” version of the world, which is slowly succumbing to ever-advancing ice.
Several screenshots of the new explorable zones were shown, though director/producer Naoki Yoshida clarified that names of the zones would not be revealed yet, particularly because the storyline leading into Evercold is not out yet, starting in Tuesday’s Patch 7.5 and continuing in September with Patch 7.55.
The artistic direction of The Fourth is a notable departure in style from what we’ve seen so far in the game. We also got a first look at “massive” new danger, currently referred to as an “Arcane Giant”, and a first look at a new NPC race that will be appearing in The Fourth, which was not named but resembles the Palicos from Monster Hunter.
Yoshida emphasized that the game is looking to evolve significantly in Patch 8.0, with a different approach to creating content, one which informs not only 8.0 but the Patch 8.x cycle. Again, it was stressed that more information would be revealed at the Berlin and Tokyo Fanfest events later this year, but we first got a look at the new “Adventurer Activity” feature, which transitions daily play and rewards into a weekly system.
The current Duty Roulette system heavily ties rewards to a daily refresh, including the maximum-level Tomestone currency needed to gear up post-expansion characters. The team is looking to move to basing these rewards on the weekly refresh instead, with a new Activity Level and an accompanying interface to represent these ideals. The provided screenshot is an early mockup that also confirmed the level cap will be increased to 110.
Players will be given Missions each week that reward them with Activity Points, subject to a weekly cap. Some of the examples of point-gaining activities included “Complete a Main Scenario Quest” (implying that this system also applies to players who are not at the current level cap), “Complete an instanced dungeon”, and “Participate in a Frontline campaign”.
Some of these missions will be repeatable, but some only offer points once. (It is likely that the “Main Scenario Quest” mission will be replaced by something else for those who are caught up on the story.) The weekly maximum-level tomestone cap is also seeing an update that will allow you to reclaim missed currency from the previous week.
The team is also looking at a different approach for Item Level progression. Previously, the only ways to obtain Best In Slot items were to either complete Savage-difficulty raid content or to spend max-level tomestones obtained over multiple weeks, but the developers want to create more ways to accomplish the same goal without locking players to specific content. More details for this new approach will be presented at Fanfest Tokyo.
The “Seasons” that previously were tied specifically to the game’s PvP side are being carried through to the rest of the experience – all included in the normal subscription fee. The game has thus far had a cycle in which even-numbered patches included new raid content and therefore a new maximum Item Level, while odd-numbered patches included a new Alliance Raid that allowed more casual players to catch up. This cycle is being formalized as “seasons”, as well as the hope from the team that the content release cadence will be speeding up after slowing down considerably after the pandemic in 2020.
Creative Studio III is also proceeding with a new approach to “Character-Focused Design”, giving players new ways to make their characters feel more unique from each other and give them more personality.
The armory system (the means by which players change from job to job and level up the individual jobs) is also receiving an update – players will now be able to reflect their highest item level across multiple jobs, rather than needing to chase gear upgrades for multiple, allowing for a significant increase in flexibility. However, this will not include features such as carrying over materia boosts. More details about this update will be given at future events.
Animations for character actions are also becoming more customizable, but further details on this will be provided during the Berlin Fanfest. The character creator is being improved with an array of new options, including a new color picker tool for eyes, hair, and skin tone, extra customization of eyes and lips, eyeshadow options, and layering of face paint. You will also be able to toggle specific parts of individual gear pieces on and off, such as removing shoulder pauldrons from a chestpiece or a scarf from a sweater.
Public field areas will be getting more dynamic events and content – previously, these zones had little to offer players who had completed the Main Scenario Quest, with repeatable FATE events and material gathering being the only real draws.
Quests are also receiving an update, and more details about both will be revealed at Berlin Fanfest, where we’ll also get more details about a new third difficulty level for 8-person raids (in between Normal and Savage), changes coming to Alliance raids, and entirely new kinds of battle content.
More work is being done to break down barriers between data centers. Player matching will now include all worlds in a regional area, including the Party Finder feature, which was previously limited to those on a single data center.
This alleviates a huge issue with the raid-focused Aether data center being frequently too congested for non-Aether players to travel to it in order to participate in content with friends; this limitation has been entirely removed, and this change is actually coming in a pre-Evercold patch, with details to be revealed later.
As expected, Evercold will introduce two new jobs to the game, as has been the case for each expansion since Shadowbringers. One will be a Tank, and the other will be a Ranged DPS, also the same as Shadowbringers, which introduced the last Tank (Gunbreaker) and the last Ranged DPS (Dancer). Yoshida was wearing a shirt with the phrase “Guess Who’s Back”, but as usual, the first job will be officially unveiled at the European Fanfest in Berlin.
Job Actions are getting a revamp, split into “Reborn Mode” and “Evolved Mode”. This will only apply to the 21 non-limited Jobs. “Reborn Mode” will be the game as we currently know it, with the usual updates coming with the increased level cap in Patch 8.0. “Evolved Mode” is tagged as “emphasizing individuality”, with a new evolution coming to job rotations that differ from Reborn Mode, with fewer inputs required.
Yoshida emphasized that this is not a simplified version of Reborn Mode, but a new way of playing each job, with Evolved Mode introducing new actions that feel more specific to each job. Players can toggle between them at any time outside of battle, with level and gear shared, and both modes available as soon as a job is unlocked.
All content will be clearable with both Reborn and Evolved Mode. Reborn Mode will only be available for the jobs that currently exist in the game, with all future jobs only featuring Evolved Mode. More details clarifying this will likely come later, as will more details on changes to individual jobs.
New revamps are also expected for the game’s existing field content, with details to be revealed later, but Evercold will, of course, feature new dungeons, gear, and crafting recipes, and we got a look at concept art for some of the new enemies to be featured. The theme for the new 8-Player Raid series was teased but will be revealed in Berlin in a few months. A new Ultimate Raid was announced as well, following the Kefka Ultimate raid coming in 7.5x, and PvP will be seeing another update.
Duty Support will get an update that may allow players to enter dungeons in pairs (more details to come in Berlin). A new Alliance Raid was teased, which will be a crossover with Neon Genesis Evangelion, tentatively called Ghosts of Desire. This will be the theme of Evercold‘s raid series, similar to the NieR crossover YoRHA: Dark Apocalypse in Shadowbringers.
The System Requirements will not be majorly changed from Dawntrail, which boosted them considerably to accommodate the massive graphical update that accompanied the Patch 7.0 release. However, Yoshida did implore players still playing the game on PlayStation 4 to consider upgrading, as the game is quickly approaching the console’s absolute limits, and the development team didn’t anticipate the PS4 version still running at this point. The development team anticipates that by Patch 8.3, the game will be too large to actually fit on the PS4.
Following the discussion of Evercold, the keynote concluded with details about the Patch 7.5 cycle. The new limited job, Beastmaster, will be coming in Patch 7.56, but there will be a significant amount of job-specific content for it at release.
The previously announced Kefka Ultimate raid got a full reveal with the title Dancing Mad (Ultimate), the name referencing the beloved song that soundtracks Kefka’s original fight in Final Fantasy VI (which was reorchestrated when the original Kefka raid was released during Stormblood). Dancing Mad (Ultimate) will be released in Patch 7.51. The game’s Korean version, which has been running behind since its launch, will finally be synchronized with the other regions, which happened with the Chinese version in Patch 7.4.
The game’s free trial will again be expanded to include the Shadowbringers expansion, including all content available through Level 80, excluding the Beastmaster job, which requires the purchase of Dawntrail. This change also makes all playable races available in the free trial, as the only remaining ones (Hrothgar and Viera) were locked behind the Shadowbringers paywall.
Patch 7.5 will come out on Tuesday, April 28. Patch 7.51, including the Dancing Mad (Ultimate) release, the final Cosmic Exploration update, and new Custom Deliveries, arrives on June 2. Berlin Fan Festival will be July 25-26, and Patch 7.55, including additions to the Hildibrand quests and the final step of the Phantom Weapon, will come on July 28. Patch 7.56 (the final story update for Dawntrail) comes on September 6, and Tokyo Fan Festival will be on October 31-November 1.
That’s everything we learned about Evercold at the keynote! We’ll keep you posted as more details are announced. You can also check out our review of Dawntrail here.
