FFXIV: A Recap of the EU Evercold Fanfest
Posted on August 2, 2026 by Aywren
The weekend of June 25-26 featured the EU FFXIV Fanfest in Berlin. Here, we got the newest info drop on the Evercold expansion, including the reveal of the new Tank job! I’m going to quickly go over all the important highlights of the Fanfest in this post!
Quick Bullet Points of New Info
I do eventually want to talk more about my impressions on the information we got in this Fanfest. Though, I will note, I was somewhat underwhelmed by how much the team is still keeping under wraps about the topics that are most important to me – open world field content and changes to gearing up.
In the meantime, here’s what we did get:
- New Tank: Bastion. Uses dual shields that transform into fist-guns.
- New gear rewarded in the new tier of 8-man raids (which don’t have a name yet), will be called “Season”
- In Evercold, we won’t be on-rails when it comes to what overworld zones we choose to do, and in what order we do them.
- Dungeons in these zones will also have special scaling to make things balance out when playing them at different levels, even with parties of real players.
- Chocobo companions are getting an update – you’ll be able to party with a friend and two chocobos to do dungeons!
- Chocobo breeding will also get an update, but we don’t have any more info than that right now.
- Gold Saucer is getting a Final Fantasy 7 style section with a new typing game GATE based on FF7 content with FF7 rewards.
- This is because the next 8-man raid series is a crossover with – you guessed it – FF7.
- AuRas will finally be able to choose a face type and horn type separately with a future 8.1 character creation update.
- Butt sliders were hinted at. We’ll see.
And really, that’s the overall recap of the most important points of the Fanfest. Of course, we got a few bits of lore and worldbuilding – which are important, but something I’d rather leave to you to discover – but as for covering features, most of the focus was placed on the Final Fantasy 7 raid. Which, for me, is merely okay.
I haven’t played the new remakes of FF7 – I refuse to buy the games individually, and I’m waiting for them to finally package all three as one purchase at hopefully a bundle price, as I’m sure they will do eventually. That and the fact that it’s a raid doesn’t stir up a lot of excitement for me.
I’ve actually heard a number of people saying something similar. The fact that we’re getting two crossovers for both raid types seems to be a bit “meh” to some folks.
For me, it’s fine. I’m not a raider, so I can wait to do them whenever. I’m currently watching through the Evangelion anime as a box set so that I’ll understand the lore of the Alliance Raid. I may or may not replay the original version of FF7, as I do have that on the Switch, and it’s been yeaaaaaaaars since I finished FF7 (literally, on the PS1).
So, my overall takeaway from this Fanfest is that they didn’t go into any details on the things I hoped to hear about. The tank class is what I expected it to be – and I’m not a tank main, so this is also merely fine, but not exciting. Some new features, like changes to chocobos, and chocobo breeding do get interest from me.
I do like what I hear about the world building and lore, but am still waiting for clarification on these “world raids” they mentioned when it comes to open world content. I’m much more interested in what the ranged DPS might be – I’m hearing a lot of speculation about a Falconeer due to things we saw in the extended trailer. But for that, we’ll have to wait until the next Fanfest!