Final Fantasy 14 isn’t any stranger to crossovers—but Evercold will be a first for the MMO, wherein both the raid series and the alliance raid series (8-man and 24-man raids, respectively) will be crossovers. With the latter being a whackadoodle Evangelion crossover, and the former being a far more reasonable FF7 one.
This won’t be the first time FF14 has had crossovers with other Final Fantasy games, mind. There have been seasonal events with Final Fantasy 15, for instance, and the Omega raid series in Stormblood was chocka with FF game references—although that was justified by way of a computer simulation. Still, we got to kick Kefka’s butt.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar+, current FF7 remake director Naoki Hamaguchi (who will be involved in the crossover) tells the site his team was really pumped to “come up with all these ideas”, but at “the same time we have to be really careful that it’s not impacting the FF14 patch release schedule, because then that would be putting the cart before the horse”.
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As a matter of fact, both Hamaguchi AND producer of FF14 Naoki Yoshida had to tell their team to “calm down” and “be reasonable”, with Hamaguchi in particular instructing his team to “look at our bandwidth to see what’s realistic and to make sure that they can do their best work”.
Which I’m glad for, to be honest. While I’ve grown fonder of Dawntrail’s host of content as the expansion has gone on, I can’t help but feel as though Creative Studio 3 was spread a little thin between making Final Fantasy 16 and its MMO, working on limited resources that, for instance, caused Occult Crescent’s first Forked Tower raid to only have one difficulty setting.
As a matter of fact, criticism of Dawntrail has been so firm that it’s finally gotten Yoshida and co. to start making big changes to the game with Evercold, which is a reassuring sign that things are on track. I’m glad that the directors of both games, then, are being purposefully reasonable about how much their teams can handle—which is good, because the prospect of getting to fight Sephiroth in my favourite MMO does fill me with glee.