TOKYO – Final Fantasy XIV players who had marked January 2027 on their calendars now have a new date to plan around. Square Enix has moved the sixth expansion, Evercold, to Tuesday, February 23, 2027, roughly a month later than the January window it gave when the expansion was revealed in April.
The date arrived at the end of the game’s Fan Festival tour in Japan, where the publisher also released a full trailer. For a live-service game whose community plans around expansion launches, a slip of a few weeks matters less as a calendar change than as a test of how much confidence players have in the schedule.
The rest of the timetable is now fixed. Pre-orders open on Wednesday, November 4, 2026, and early access is scheduled to begin on Friday, February 19, 2027 at 1:00 a.m. Pacific time, four days before general release, according to the studio’s notice.
Square Enix set out those dates in its announcement on the Lodestone, the game’s official news hub. The notice says pre-orders carry a range of bonuses and that early access is part of the pre-order package. It does not describe why the launch moved.
That gap is the most important thing the public record does not yet answer. Developers rarely explain a slip of this size in detail, and nothing in the official notice ties the new date to a specific problem, so any explanation circulating online remains speculation.
What players can see is the product being sold. The expansion’s official page, on the Evercold website, now lists the February 19 early access start, and its media section carries the full trailer along with showcases of two new jobs, Bastion and Zephyr, and a new area called Naglfar. Square Enix also describes a system for certain areas that automatically adjusts content to a character’s level and allows parties of mixed level ranges to be matched together.
The original January 2027 window was announced on April 24, 2026, at the North American Fan Festival, and it was the headline of that reveal. Moving it now, with the full trailer and a pre-order date attached, suggests the publisher is treating the new date as the one it intends to hold, though a studio cannot guarantee that and has not said so.
For players, the practical effect is simple. Anyone planning time off, a guild schedule or a return to the game around a January launch should plan for late February instead, and anyone pre-ordering from November 4 should expect the early access weekend to arrive before the Tuesday release.
The unresolved question is whether the extra weeks change what ships on day one. Square Enix has not said whether any announced feature has moved to a later patch, and the launch itself will be the first real evidence of how the extended schedule was used.
