Earlier today, an Official Post on The Lodestone revealed the official dates for 2026’s Fan Festival alongside a brief trailer. Alongside the following text:
“Get ready to celebrate your love for FINAL FANTASY XIV with fellow Warriors of Light because Fan Festival 2026 is coming to North America, Europe, and Japan!
The events will feature fun presentations and panels, immersive activities, and unforgettable live concerts. Preparations are already underway in each region to make for unforgettable experiences, so mark your calendars and prepare to make memories that will last a lifetime!“
2026 Fanfest Dates
As always, you can expect multiple fan festivals with one for North America, one for Europe and one for Japan. The dates and locations for each fanfest are:
FAN FESTIVAL 2026 in ANAHEIM:
- Friday, 24 April 2026 and Saturday, 25 April 2026
- Anaheim Convention Center
FAN FESTIVAL 2026 in BERLIN:
- Saturday, 25 July 2026 and Sunday, 26 July 2026
- Messe Berlin, hub27
FAN FESTIVAL 2026 in TOKYO:
- Saturday, 31 October 2026 and Sunday, 1 November 2026
- Makuhari Messe
What Can You Expect From 2026’s Fanfest?
With the Fan Festival now officially set for 2026, players can look forward to a showcase that traditionally brings the biggest announcements for the game and it’s next expansion. Previous Fanfests have featured full expansion reveals & dates, job showcases, and glimpses into new system changes (remember 2 dye channels last time when the crowd went wild?).
This means we’re almost certain to get the first deep dive into Patch 8.0, including its setting, story direction, and the jobs slowly being revealed over each fanfest. Expect, keynote presentations, a trailer which expands over each fanfest as they show the new job and the kind of reveals that set the tone for the entire expansion cycle.
Of course, you do not need to go to the Fanfest itself to learn this new information. The Keynote Presentations will be streamed live as well as other streams for various panels and the like. Going to the Fanfest itself can be quite the experience however so if you’re interested, now is the time to get booking!
So, When Would 8.0 Release?
Now that we have information for Fanfest, we can use this to estimate when 8.0 will be dropping. Historically speaking, the next expansion would release anywhere from 3-6 months after the JP fanfest leaving us around the Feb-May area.
Following the patch cycle and basing it on last expansion, that leaves us with mid February. That being said, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 and 7.0 all released in June/July, so February may be low-balling estimations too much with the teams love for a summer expansion date. On the other hand, with some players expecting a Fanfest announcement on the last PLL, it could be that the team is instead trying to shorten the gap between reveal and launch so there will be less time to wait after the JP Fanfest.
What Does This Mean For Content Releases?
With there being a roughly 3-year gap between 7.0 and 8.0, this likely means we will not have a savage raid tier at all in 2026 with players expecting another christmas savage tier. That being said, there is a lot of content slated for 7.5X, so it does seem that the team expected this already.
The next Ultimate, Beastmaster (and hopefully Blue Mage updates), Occult Crescent‘s 2nd area, Cosmic Exploration’s Final Planet, the final Phantom and Cosmic Relics all release in 7.5X. Additionally, some of the content releasing before then aims to have more longevity than recent releases with Deep Dungeon’s Quantum difficulty, and talks of a similar system with Variant/Criterion. But only time will tell if this is enough to fill the ever-increasing end of expansion gap.
