Overview
- Naoki Yoshida used the North American Fan Festival over the weekend to confirm that Evercold will overhaul combat and remove the long-standing two-minute buff timing meta.
- Square Enix will scrap party-wide synergy actions that forced every job to stack cooldowns every 120 seconds, a system that often broke when bosses became untargetable mid-window.
- Combat will split into two styles called Reborn and Evolved, with Reborn preserving today’s kits and Evolved introducing new mechanics, and all future jobs planned only for Evolved.
- Developer demos showed condensed, more distinct gameplay such as Paladin counter-attacks tied to well-timed defense, a Dragoon ultimate with heavy damage reduction while airborne, Bard mobility tweaks, and instant-cast healer attacks to shift focus back to GCD healing.
- Yoshida said the team will keep and update current job designs to avoid a Star Wars Galaxies–type backlash, and early reactions were upbeat even as journalists warned of likely launch growing pains.