Yesterday and today is the European edition of the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival. We are in Berlin and bring you all the most important details from the conference, as well as answers to the press questions we asked the game director.
This weekend, Berlin is hosting the European edition Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festivala. It is one of the three major festivals that take place on different continents: Europe, America and Asia. The first one was held in Anaheim, California, and you can read our report from that event here, while the last Fan Festival of the year is reserved for Tokyo.
The kind team from Square Enix once again invited us to hang out with the fans, but also take a first-hand look at the news and ask a few questions to director Naoki Yoshida, better known as Yoshi-P.
The launch conference featured an extended trailer for the upcoming Evercold expansion, including a brand new class named Bastion. It is a tank that uses two shields and can transform them into claws or ranged weapons.
Yoshi-P later revealed a few additional details to us – Bastion will primarily rely on defense and recovery, and it is interesting that the inspiration for this class was not taken from any existing “job” from the Final Fantasy series.
The other big news is about the new raid collaboration. After last year’s announcement of cooperation with Evangelion, it is now confirmed that a raid inspired by it will arrive in the future Final Fantasy VII called Beyond the Lifestream.
Yoshi-P told us that he had been waiting for the right moment for a crossover like this for years, and the end of the remake trilogy seemed like the perfect opportunity. Some of the key people working on Final Fantasy VII also collaborate on the content, which is why we are especially intrigued by this addition.
Of the other information, it is worth highlighting:
- The Switch 2 version arrives on 8/4 with a free month subscription
- the story in Evercold branches, so it will be possible to go through it in different order
- Due to the branching of the story, automatic difficulty balance for dungeons was also introduced
- a first look at Character Action Skins is shown, which allow changing the animations of popular actions and attacks
- three new locations were discovered
- changes to the Chocobo Companion system have been announced
- in the 10th month, the testing of merging players from the same region in Japan starts
- Gold Saucer gets a new typing-based mini-game
- the team is considering the modernization of the house system and the easier entry of new players into the game
The Evercold expansion arrives in the first month of 2027, and if you haven’t jumped into Final Fantasy XIV yet, you can still try the game for free up to level 80.