FFXIV Announces Fan Festival 2026
Posted on August 30, 2025 by Aywren
This week, FFXIV announced the dates and locations of the next Fan Fest, taking place in 2026. As per usual, we have three of them – one for NA, one for EU, and one for JP.
However, despite Yoshi-P’s attempt to drum up excitement about the Fan Fest announcement, even releasing this information on the day of ARR’s anniversary, this has only gone on to further stir the pot of uncertainty with fans. Why? Because in the past, Fan Fest is used to announce and bring the hype for the next expansion. There’s a certain cadence of time between these events and the expansion release date.
The fact that the Fan Fest events are spaced out as they are, on top of the last Fan Fest taking place in October-November of next year, has raised some red flags. Basically, people are concerned that if S/E follows patterns of the past (as they tend to do), we won’t see the 8.0 expansion until May or June of 2027… which… is a long time to be sitting in Dawntrail, one of the most divisive expansions this game has produced.
There are a number of forum threads, Reddit threads, and of course, YouTube videos already speculating what this might mean.
Some folks are saying that you can’t judge the release date by the date of the live events, which could be true. Some folks are saying that maybe we’ll get a patch 7.6 to fill the blank, which would be a first. Some folks are just dooming and glooming that there will be either no content for a long time, or that even the content releases for the next two patches will get staggered and drawn out.
People are trying to theorize things based on past release patterns in FFXIV. This is fair seeing the game is very rote and stuck to its past patterns.
However, no matter which way you look at it, FFXIV is going to break one pattern or another going forward. Either, the dates of the Fan Fests cannot determine the expansion release date… or the expansion really does get pushed back that far, which would be the longest wait we’ve seen between expansions.
I know that there’s been nothing but talk about this “quantum” difficulty, with Yoshi-P noting that they want to start making content that can be scaled in difficulty so that the same piece of content will be enjoyed by more people. But he also noted in a recent interview that putting resources towards this means that there may be less overall content produced… which… does not sit well with some folks.
It does seem like the team is trying to make some changes, but what those changes will be is yet to be seen. I feel like Yoshi-P should have foreseen the type of doomsaying the dates of the Fan Fests would cause, and should have up front told the community one way or another what to expect.
FFXIV players are already up in arms and ready to scrutinize every little move S/E makes. I admit that even I have been scratching my head at some of the choices they’ve been making lately. It would go a long way to have a little more clear communication in these times of uncertainty.
Quick Update!
After drafting this post, we did get a small bit of info from Yoshi-P on the concerns above. I’m not exactly certain how to parse this, but in his post about mods, he wrote this:
While I don’t know if this means we won’t have to wait for long before we know more about what comes after the Japanese Fan Fest… or if we won’t have to wait very long after the Japanese Fan Fest for the release of 8.0 – I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, this tells me that the community concern has been noted and will be addressed.
I’m still here for the long term. Syn and I have even discussed attending the Fan Fest, which was something I hadn’t considered before they released the date and location of the NA fest. So, I’m going to hope for the best at this point.