Yeah so stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The Warrior of Light! Alphinaud! Estinien! Exploring an ice-covered region! There are Au Ras! If you immediately raised your hand and said, “I know that! That’s FFXIV‘s Heavensward expansion!”, you’d be dead wrong. But also correct. Because all I got from the trailer of FFXIV: Evercold was Heavensward vibes.
Anyway, the new expansion for Final Fantasy XIV is titled Evercold, and you can check out the trailer down below.
This expansion seems to heavily feature Alphinaud and Estinien in an all-new world that’s been taken over by the cold. The trailer is framed around an older lady telling a young Au Ra girl a bedtime story. The Warrior of Light is part of the story, and I imagine we’ll be regaled with all sorts of fun tales about how they managed to save the world from some other world-ending threat.
In all seriousness, though, even as someone who wasn’t that crazy about Heavensward, I have to admit this got me a lot more excited than Dawntrail ever did. I liked Dawntrail just fine, but that expansion couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to be an anime filler arc or fall back into the same ol’ “end of the world” plot line once again, and that ended up hurting it a lot in my view. With Evercold, it seems that FFXIV is finally moving out of the setup phase and it’s ready to properly start the next arc in the saga of The Warrior of Light.
Aside from the new expansion, Square Enix also casually announced that Final Fantasy XIV will be coming to the Switch 2 in August 2026. I have no idea how that’s going to work because this game is big as hell, especially with all the released expansions so far. In addition to that, Switch 2 players will need a separate subscription from the PC and PS5 versions. This means that your existing subscription will not apply to the Switch 2 version.
Finally, Evercold‘s Alliance raid will be themed around Evangelion. The raid series is called Evangelion – Ghosts of Desire, and it’ll be created in collaboration with khara, Inc. I half expected Yoko Taro to show up to say he’s writing this one too, but alas, I should be so lucky.
Here are all the new features you can expect from the upcoming expansion:
- Two new jobs: tank and physical ranged DPS
- Level cap increase from 100 to 110
- New cities
- Distinctive new areas
- New gigantic constructs and other monstrous threats to overcome
- New allies to encounter
- New dungeons
- New trials
- A new raid series
- A new Ultimate raid
- PvP updates
- Ongoing content updates, including new gear and crafting recipes, updates to the Duty Support System and more
Players can also expect more changes to the battle system, which should be particularly exciting this time around as FFXIV may finally be moving away from the two-minute meta that has been so prevalent in the game for years.
Final Fantasy XIV: Evercold is set to be released in January 2027.
