Final Fantasy 14's Shadowbringers expansion releases July 2, new classes announced

Announced during Final Fantasy 14's fan festival in Paris, the new Shadowbringers expansion will be launching on July 2, 2019.

Shadowbringers, which will be Final Fantasy 14's third expansion, will have the usual level cap raised from 70 to 80, a whole chunk of new story, and new zones. But game director Naoki Yoshida also announced that several new classes (called jobs in FF14 parlance) would be coming in the expansion. Gunbreakers, the first announced class, are a Final Fantasy staple—sword wielders whose blade doubles also as a gun. They aren't a ranged class, though: Yoshida said that they use the gun to enhance their up-close slashing attacks. During the keynote presentation, it was revealed this job would fill the role of tanking in groups.

Yoshida didn't reveal the location of the new expansion (the common theory is that it'll take place in Garlemald, the home continent of FF14's big villains), but he did show off several new zones including a massive forest and an area occupied by pixies, complete with a winged castle (see image below).

Shadowbringers will also bring a whopping nine new dungeons and some maintenance to the battle system, which will probably include pruning some unnecessary abilities to simplify players' action bars. One cool new feature coming in Shadowbringers is the "Trust System", which lets players team up with NPCs for content that would otherwise require a group. What's cool about this is that those NPCs are the other story characters that you'll be familiar with, so more solo-minded players don't have to group up with others if they don't want to.

We're boots on the ground in Paris at the Fan Festival, so we'll be updating this post with more information as it becomes available. But for now, you can look forward to playing Shadowbringers on July 2.

Several of Shadowbringers' new raids will be created by Nier's game designer Yoko Taro—read more about that here.

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.