How FFXIV Evercold will change the MMO's outdated features

The bones of Final Fantasy 14 haven't altered much over the years, but with Evercold's story and combat, Square Enix is looking to shake things up. Producer Naoki Yoshida outlined some of these planned changes during his Berlin Fan Fest keynote address, starting with branching narrative paths in Evercold's main narrative quests.

Yoshida's version of "branching narrative" is more in line with how Square Enix handled Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's character relationship scenes than with games whose stories change based on choices. Here's how it works. You start with the same initial quest as everyone else, but after completing it, you can pick any of the next three or however many quests in whatever order you want. After tackling them all, the story converges again for everyone on the same quest. Yoshida said the intent is to give players more freedom to move through the story the way they want and potentially have different experiences from others, even though the narrative itself stays the same.

Square Enix previously resisted the idea of letting players instantly teleport to a quest-giver's location and made you teleport to the nearest fast-travel point and walk or ride from there. Yoshida said that time-saving feature has become more popular in modern games, and as Square Enix wants to let you fit FF14 into your schedule rather than have it dominate your life, the team will give you the option to teleport to a quest-giver's location in Evercold. Or that's the goal, anyway. Yoshida said that the intense work involved in making this happen means it's still under development and may not be fully implemented by the time Evercold launches.

Image: Square Enix

That means folks will approach dungeons and other field activities in these less linear quests at different levels from each other, so Square Enix is introducing a new auto-balancing system to help address inconsistencies. The system adjusts enemy level and dungeon difficulty based on an individual player's level in real time, rather than syncing every player's level and capping it, removing access to certain skills and combos, as the game currently does. These changes will only apply in Evercold's main scenario, though Yoshida said the team is planning how to expand it in future updates.

Also on the subject of dungeons, Yoshida said Evercold's duty support updates will expand how you can approach these instanced challenges. Beginning in FF14 8.1, for example, you can bring your chocobo companion into a dungeon to fight alongside you. A light party formerly had to consist of four characters (either human-controlled or NPC). After this update, you can have two human, or human-adjacent, characters and two chocobo, and you can change your chocobo's combat role. Like with all duty support updates, these will not immediately be applied to dungeons in previous expansions.

Yoshida also outlined the new armory system's item level upgrades in a bit more detail. During the April Fan Fest, Square Enix said the new changes will let you copy the gear with the highest item level from one job to another to reduce how long it takes to put a job set together. However, copying item levels won't change a gear piece's parameters that you can influence with materia and the like, Yoshida said, so if you want to reach your job's full potential, there's still value in tracking down the best-in-slot pieces for that class.

And we finally got to see the new character action skins. Yoshida teased them in April but explained a bit more about how they work and showed some of them in a brief trailer. Character action skins replace existing animations for certain actions — emotes, field actions like teleport, and even some job actions — with something flashier and new. Yoshida showed two skins for the teleport action alongside the standard animation: The first wraps the player in light as they do a flamboyant pirouette before vanishing, and the second has dark energy pour out of them as they're swallowed up by a void. Some of FF14's animations haven't changed for more than a decade, so it's a pretty big deal. Customizable job action animations will roll out "gradually" starting in patch 8.1 with more actions in subsequent patches, though Yoshida didn't specify which jobs and actions the first update includes.

Final Fantasy 14 Evercold launches in January for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.