Square Enix has delayed Final Fantasy XIV Evercold's release date, producer Naoki Yoshida announced during the Fan Fest Tokyo event, but it's not a big delay. The MMO's expansion was originally planned for a late January launch, but Yoshida decided to delay the launch by three weeks. Evercold's early access launch is now set for Feb. 19, and the full launch is Feb. 23.
Pre-orders begin on Nov. 4. Yoshida said the expansion's essential features were progressing smoothly, but he decided to delay for quality. "We were on track to just barely get the game to you in the stated frame," Yoshida said.
"This is being done to make sure we can deliver on the many promises we've made. We appreciate your understanding as we near the finish line." That the team needed extra time to ensure quality isn't too surprising. Evercold will introduce a number of features new to Final Fantasy XIV, including a more open progression system for main story quests where you can pursue questlines in a less linear fashion.
There's also an auto-balance adjustment system that helps ensure enemy level and duty difficulty scales to match everyone's level, in case players joining a duty are at different levels. Evercold also changes FFXIV's progression from daily to weekly so folks have more flexibility. If you can't play for a few days, you aren't missing out, and you can even go back and earn reward points from previous weeks if you weren't able to complete them for some reason.
And Evercold adds the new Evolved battle style aimed at streamlining combat, which Yoshida said the team is still tweaking it for all the non-Evercold jobs and role actions. Square Enix is planning a whole Live Letter dedicated to how Evolved mode works sometime befor Evercold's launch. Anyway, it's a lot to get right, and it's definitely not a set of features you'd want to launch in a buggy state.
As with previous expansions, you'll be able to start playing Evercold from the early access date only if you have an active subscription, pre-ordered Evercold, and registered the pre-order bonus code ahead of the early access launch date.
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