At the last fanfest, Square Enix officially announced a new addition for Final Fantasy 14 — Evercold. Together with him, the team promised the most extensive revision of the work system in the entire history of the game. The new “Evolved” versions of classes will receive unique mechanics that simply did not exist in FF14 before.
For example, an upgraded Paladin will be able to counterattack if a defensive cooldown is activated exactly at the moment of an opponent’s strike — something like a parry system. Dragoon will have an ultimate attack with a jump into the air, during which the developers consider reducing the damage received by 90%.
Does it sound radical? Yes. But more importantly, despite all this progress, the old versions of classes are not going anywhere.
Table of Contents
The Reborn Mode Explained: Why Square Enix Didn’t Just Overwrite the Old Jobs
The developers are introducing a special switch — Reborn mode, which will allow players to use the usual “pre-Evercold” versions of works. The reason is pragmatic: The old raids and content were physically created to match the current balance. It’s not a trivial task to include Evolved mechanics in them and not break half of the encounters.
But there is something personal behind this decision for the game’s director, Naoki Yoshida, known to the community as Yoshi-P.
Star Wars Galaxies NGE: The MMO Disaster That Still Haunts FF14
At a Q&A session attended by VPE this weekend, Yoshi-P pointed directly to Star Wars Galaxies as a cautionary tale — an example of what not to do when you’re changing a living game people have spent years in.
In 2005, the Galaxies team released the New Game Enhancements — a sweeping update meant to modernise and streamline the MMO. The intentions were good. The fallout was anything but:
-
Dozens of unique professions were cut or collapsed into simplified classes.
-
Deep social roles — musicians, doctors, crafters — lost their mechanical purpose overnight.
-
A new expansion launched alongside the NGE, and players who’d just bought it demanded refunds.
-
The community began haemorrhaging players in a wave that never reversed.
The servers shut down permanently in December 2011.
Yoshi-P didn’t hide his feelings about it: “I actually really liked Star Wars Galaxies and its game design — but they took an existing system and just changed it to something entirely new, and players did not take that very well. I know people have been referring to it as a very tragic incident.”
That lesson became the foundation of how Evercold approaches its job redesign.
Yoshi-P: “I Didn’t Want to Just Suddenly Remove What We’ve Been Used To”
Final Fantasy 14 has been around since 2010. Counting from A Realm Reborn, the legendary relaunch that literally saved the game from closure, it’s been 13 years. During this time, each class has developed its own audience, its own habits, and its own well-honed rotations over the years.
“I knew I didn’t want to just suddenly take away what we were all used to. It was my decision from the very beginning,” says Yoshi-P.
At the same time, he sees in Dawntrail, the previous addition, the first signs of a change of course. The new Viper and Pictomancer classes already carried the features of Evolved design: more expressive mechanics, clearer gameplay identity. According to the director, it is this accumulated experience that now allows us to carefully apply new principles to old works, without shock to the players.
Two Full Job Systems at Once: Can FF14 Evercold Actually Pull This Off?
The main question that remains open is: how realistic is it to support two sets of mechanics for more than twenty classes at the same time? This is a huge burden on the balancing team.
On the one hand, Evolved mode will clearly become the main mode – new content will be built for it. On the other hand, Reborn mode cannot be abandoned: thousands of players who are not ready for drastic changes will continue to live in it.
Time will tell whether Square Enix will be able to find this point of balance. But one thing can be said now: the team has learned from the mistakes of others. And that in itself deserves respect.
