Members of the Technocore Free Company at Final Fantasy Fan Fest 2026 in Berlin. (Image: Pia | Technocore)
Over the weekend, Berlin saw thousands of avid Final Fantasy 14 fans descend on a convention centre in the heart of the city. Plenty in attendance were there to see the favourite game’s director, Noaki Yoshida, announce new content coming soon to the MMO, including parts of the upcoming Evercold expansion. But for some, it was to meet people they’d spent hundreds of hours playing with online in-person.
In Square Enix’s massively multiplayer online game, community is at its centre. Players sign up to guilds known as Free Companies, groups that band together to complete quests, raid dungeons, or just hang out in a virtual social space.
Members of these Free Companies become so tight-knight that they’re willing to hop on public transport and travel hundreds of miles to meet up at events like Fan Fest in-person, despite only having ever communicated with each other online.
I caught up with the leader of one of these Free Companies, a player known as Pia, and a bunch of her online friends at Berlin’s Fan Fest. I wanted to find out just how these groups of people find each other, and whether the social dynamic changes when swapping a virtual hang-out for real life.
“Can I interest you in joining my Free Company?”
Pia tells me she became the leader of the Free Company known as ‘Technocore’ after she inherited the title from the previous leader and founder. Its name is inspired by the sci-fi novel series Hyperion and Endymion series by Dan Simmons, which the original owner was a huge fan of.
“I was recruited by the former founder,” Pia tells me as we catch up shortly after Yoshida’s opening keynote on day one of Fan Fest Berlin. “I had a message in my Adventure Plate that said ‘No UWU-ing, penalty 350 gil’. People would just randomly text me and then pay me money,” she laughs.
“[The founder] also texted me and was like, “Now that I have your attention, can I interest you in joining my Free Company?.
“I was like, “Sure, why not?”.”
A custom numberplate memorabilia piece created by the Technocore Free Company. (Image: Pia | Technocore)
More Free Company members started to trickle in over the years. “I remember Pascal joined because he didn’t want to play by himself,” Pia explains. “He was struggling to find people to play Leviathan with him, so he joined the Free Company and then started playing with us.”
Her boyfriend Konny, who was also in attendance at Fan Fest, ended up getting “abducted” into the game too. “And [Andreas] just showed up one day,” Pia jokes.
Andreas adds a little more context, explaining: “I went on a community finder page, looked for a new guild that was smaller, more active and just joined them one day.”
Joining Pia, Konny and Andreas were Pascal, Zissis, Rapha and Elli, all of whom had travelled from various corners of Germany to share an Airbnb and attend Fan Fest together – all over a shared love of Final Fantasy 14. While a few of them had met at Gamescom and Dokomi a year prior, most of them had never met each other in person before finding each other in Square Enix’s vast virtual world.
Depending on how much content there is at the time, these folks are used to playing the game on a daily basis. Whether it be embarking on quests together or completing some of the challenging raids the game has to offer, they’ve become extremely familiar with each other’s ‘vibe’, as Andreas puts it.
“ Recently we cleared the last Savage tier, the eight S fight together,” Andreas recollects fondly when I ask what some of their favourite memories are of playing together. “Pretty much everyone in the guild was in the static, and we managed to clear it together for the first time.
“It was pretty nice to grow into the role of getting into Savage raiding and actually succeeding to clear a fight in the end.”
Thousands of Final Fantasy 14 fans attended Fan Fest Berlin to see producer Naoki Yoshida on stage. (Image: Square Enix | Mark Buckley)
At Fan Fest, cosplay is king
Like many attendees at Fan Fest, Pia is dressed up in a cosplay of her own character’s virtual avatar in the game, ‘Felicity Pawter’. It’s an impressive display, one that must have taken her hours to put together, but she explains that it’s something she loves to do both in and out of Final Fantasy 14.
“I love dressing up and dressing my character up,” she tells me. “Being able to change and tweak things to be exactly how I want it to be is great, I love it.”
Pia also had a second outfit ready to go for day two, cosplaying as the Yuakata version of the Y’shtola Rhul character, an existing name from FF14 lore. Cosplaying characters is so important to Final Fantasy fans that there’s an entire section of the show dedicated to fans showing off their work, with Pia herself taking to the stage in her outfit.
Self-expression is hugely important in an MMO like Final Fantasy 14, with it something that producer Yoshi-P focused on heavily during his keynote address. The ability to change things like horns, battle scars and war paint garnered some of the biggest cheers of the whole event when they were announced during the keynote, exemplifying how much of this community yearns for ways to make their online characters as authentic to themselves as possible.
“It’s not as if he’s a completely different person now than when we’re playing together.”
The online authenticity of these fans extends into real life, too. When I asked the group whether it feels any different to hang out in real life, Pia responded, “For me personally, it just feels like a continuation. It doesn’t feel any different, it’s not as if he’s a completely different person now than when we’re playing together.”
Andreas feels the same way, chiming in, “We knew people for a while, we knew their vibe. It’s no different for me.”
While the group enjoys hanging out together in person, their geography can make that tricky. Although a couple of the group live nearby, many of them live “all across Germany”, with some of Technocore also located in Switzerland – they sadly couldn’t make it to Fan Fest this year, Pia laments.
As such, while events like Fan Fest are a great excuse to bring players together, they wouldn’t happen without the virtual space that they all spend their time bonding in. It doesn’t sound like these folks have intention of stopping playing anytime soon, either.
Final Fantasy 14 has an FF7 crossover coming next year. (Image: Square Enix)
Berlin’s Fan Fest gave players plenty to look forward to in 2027, including the reveal of the Evercold expansion’s first new job, Bastion. Pia expressed that she’s most excited to jump into the new Final Fantasy 7-themed raid series, while Elli was keen to see more of the Evangelion crossover.
The enthusiasm for both the game and their community is palpable while I speak to the members of Technocore, and Pia was keen to impart some tips for players looking to find a community of their own.
When I asked what advice she would give to other players thinking about joining a Free Company in Final Fantasy 14, she replied enthusiastically, “Do it. Just try it out.
“If you don’t vibe with the people, that’s okay. You can always find another group, and then maybe you’ll click. If you don’t, that’s okay, because nobody’s going to chain you down.”
As for how players can go about finding their people, there are a few ways they can do that. “There’s a community finder if you’re actively looking for people that are curating their space,” Pia explains.
“Sometimes there’s people going around the main cities making advertisements for their FC. You can text and ask them. And sometimes you just get randomly invited to an FC, so everything’s possible.”
The next Final Fantast Fan Fest is due to take place in Tokyo on October 31 and November 1.
