In our interview with Final Fantasy XV Game Director Hajime Tabata revealed that his development on the game “started two years ago,” with previous Game Director Tetsuya Nomura now focused on Kingdom Hearts III.
As part of some other interviews, Tabata elaborated on the status of FFXV, explaining to Game Informer that, “In terms of development, about 50 to 60% of the game is complete. We kind of started from the beginning of the game, so the first part is more complete than the others.”
In a separate interview with Kotaku, Tabata narrowed the number by saying it’s 55% completed. However, that number is misleading, as it’s not 55% from the beginning of development eight years ago, but rather 55% since Tabata joined two years ago.
So when might Final Fantasy XV release? Tabata says it’s going to take a while:
During the “Versus era” – though it might be weird to refer to it that way – we weren’t able to reveal any information on release timing because that was a project in which we had to overcome so many different problems that arose. Unfortunately, while we were trying to work through the issues, the timing never matched. But about two years ago, when I officially joined the project, we did a pretty major directional change when we decided not to go with the previous generation.
I also had to talk with Nomura-san about the direction FF XV is going to take. Unfortunately, it’s still going to take a while, but I’m hoping people will reset their timers from when I joined the team and restart the count from there.
There is some good news though, with Tabata telling 4Gamer that the fundamental parts of the game are pretty much implemented, and he doesn’t expect there to be much of a wait after the demo is out (the demo is undated at the moment).
Do you think Final Fantasy XV will release in Japan in 2015? Or do you think every region will receive it in 2016?
[Source: Game Informer, Kotaku, 4Gamer via Gematsu]