Square Enix Says It Can Now Develop HD Games Much Faster Thanks To Final Fantasy XV

Final Fantasy XV’s key developers in director Hajime Tabata, game designer Takefumi Terada, and Episode Ignis director Yoichi Kuroda were featured in this week’s issue of Famitsu magazine to talk about everything up until now for Final Fantasy XV and what’s to come. [Thanks, Hachima.]

Here are highlights from the interview:

• In terms of development deadlines for Final Fantasy XV, Square Enix had over 20 last year.

• At least once a month, Square Enix worked on releasing something of consistent quality and no bugs. Thanks to this, Square Enix feels that it gained the technique to develop HD games at an incredibly high speed, and that its staff improved to become tougher and speedier.

• Making Episide Ignis multi-ending was planned from the start. Getting “players to fight for fate” was something Square Enix wanted to do more than anything. They were overall happy to see reactions from fans, whether they were for it or against it.

• The Insomnia map that is being added in Final Fantasy XV Royal Edition is roughly the size of a hub area.

• Square Enix reiterated that the first new DLC we’ll see this year is Episode: Ardyn and that at first they wanted to release three episodes in 2018, but plans have changed. After thinking about what kind of content they’ll be finishing with, it was decided to make it four episodes.

• For those of you wondering just what kind of content Square Enix will offer with the new episodes, they’ll share everything about all at once later.

• This new content won’t be anything to keep things going, but rather, it will be offered as something with value, and something meaningful to the player’s experience.

Final Fantasy XV is available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It also releases today, in approximately less than an hour as of this article, on Steam. You can check out our previous report to read about how Hajime Tabata recently asked fans if they’d like to see a happy ending or a super bad ending.