Square Enix producer and director Naoki Yoshida used the Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival in Berlin to detail Evercold, the MMO's next expansion, revealing one of its two new jobs, a Final Fantasy 7 raid collaboration, and a run of changes to how quests, dungeons and animations work. Evercold launches in January for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
A tank built around twin shields
The new job is Bastion, a main tank that Polygon reports is the first Final Fantasy 14 class with no counterpart in an earlier Final Fantasy game. It fights with a pair of shields called Skyltborg, described in the keynote as shape-changing, aether-powered turrets that work as both defensive devices and artillery. Yoshida brought physical models of the shields on stage, then set them down because of their weight.
"Main tank" is a designation from Evercold's reworked combat system, marking a tank built for defence and offence rather than support. A reveal trailer showed the job raising a magic shield, firing charged shots from range, cracking the ground beneath an enemy and running a melee combo chain; Yoshida said it also gains a set of curative abilities. Rock Paper Shotgun reports the job starts at level 90. A second new job, a ranged DPS, is being held back until the Tokyo Fan Fest in October.
A Final Fantasy 7 raid and system changes
Yoshida was joined by Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth director Naoki Hamaguchi to announce Beyond the Lifestream, an eight-player raid series themed on Final Fantasy 7. The pair said original Final Fantasy 7 writer Kazushige Nojima is supervising the story and Tetsuya Nomura is handling design, with Motomu Toriyama assisting. Rock Paper Shotgun reports the series runs to three full raid tiers and includes outfits themed on Barret and Tifa. A Gold Saucer update on October 28 will add an attraction modelled on the venue as it appeared in Final Fantasy 7.
Several long-standing systems are also changing. Evercold's main scenario will let players take some quests in whatever order they like before the story converges again, and Square Enix is adding an auto-balancing system that adjusts enemy level and dungeon difficulty to an individual player's level in real time, rather than syncing every player down and locking off skills. Yoshida said the team is also working on letting players teleport directly to a quest-giver, but cautioned that the feature may not be finished when the expansion ships.
Duty support is expanding as well. From patch 8.1, a light party can be made up of two players and two chocobo companions, with the chocobo combat role adjustable; as with previous duty support work, the change does not apply retroactively to older expansions. The same patch begins a gradual rollout of character action skins, which replace long-unchanged animations for emotes, field actions such as teleport, and some job abilities.
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