Final Fantasy 15 Delay Confirmed, New Release Date Announced

@Abberon: Nice way to warp my words. I didn't say that I'll buy a PS4 because I'm a grown-up. That's stupid.

Adults consume media based on their own opinion and personal tastes, because by the time you reach a certain age, you don't need validation from your peers to "like" something. You know from your own background whether you're inclined to enjoy something or not. This is particularly interesting while I watch a generation younger than me whose only drive is to "flak" stuff because that's what the "cool kids" do. Too bad some older fellows are too weak-minded and follow suit.

Regarding the game itself, it seems like a fresh entry in the FF series. Most complaints seem to come from the cast looks, or the combat system. I wasn't very pleased by the combat showcased at E3 this year, but there's a difference between seeing a game in action and actually playing it. It all boils down to the player's mindset. If you're half-hearted about a game and get into it by thinking "this is gonna suck", surprise! It will suck. Shit can suck even if you're enthusiastic about it (that was my case with FFX), let alone if you're telling yourself for months that you're not gonna like it.

On the other hand, if you have a positive outlook, you're bound to be more successful in finding joy. Combat seemed way too loose in my opinion, but maybe I'm wrong. I'll only know when I get to play it.

About the cast, they sure look dumb, but don't they always do? This kind of thing might have been appealing when I was 16, now I just don't care. What I see is a prince and his entourage in a technological setting and I find this appealing, specially when we consider it has never been done before. There's a huge open world (which I'll bet is seamless, considering it could be done in Xenoblade Chronicles X on the Wii U, of all platforms), and I can only hope for inspired, sprawling futuristic cities, which is something I long to see ever since I started playing JRPGs some 20 years ago. For me, those alone are reasons to buy a PS4 and FFXV, even more so after I spent a long time in a limbo waiting for a game to come along and blow me away while I put no effort whatsoever towards even trying to like the damn thing. In the end, it all comes down to personal choice.

You don't have to agree with me. Heck, I don't even want you to. But you MUST respect that everyone is different and are entitled to like whatever the hell they want, regardless of what you think of it.

And THAT's what grown-ups do. Maybe you will get it someday.

@00J:Fortunately no. Incoming history wall :)

It was a concept in 2006. The trailer that we saw at 2006 was for a game that barely had anything more than a skeleton concept. Much like a car manufacturer designs and builds a fantastic concept car to give customers and investors and idea of what they can do and to give the rest of the company a direction, so this trailer was made to show off a story concept. That was where FF 13 failed. It wasn't until the E3 2006 trailer (which they slapped together) that the dev teams finally said, "Oooohhh...that's what we're doing." FF 13 released and felt like a many isolated projects. I doubt this was coincidence.

FF Versus 13 started with the conceptual trailer to get everyone on track, and by "everyone" I mean a small, core dev team to work out what the game was going to be. It was originally an idea for a dark, Kingdom-Hearts-style action game. It was going be a small FF offshoot.

Then time went on and Tetsuya Nomura and his writers and expanded their ideas and their world grew. As they were growing it, some software people spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make an open world and how the sword-teleportation thing would work. Open world games often fake detail by putting facades on geometry, but now the sword teleportation thing wants a lot of scenery stuff to be climbable and collideable rather than invisible walls. And if you can teleport to a building's side, how high can you go? Can airships get involved? Based on demos, Nomura apparently said "yes". This is an enormous technical challenge. The first publically shown gameplay demo wasn't released until 2011, and it only showed off some early open world concepts.

So they kept tinkering and exploring ideas until late 2011, when pre-production ceased and it entered full production (it hasn't been in full productoin since 2006, only since 2011). Then in early 2013 they released the first video showing working sword teleportation. This tech stuff took awhile.

It almost hit some rocky times in 2013 when Square Enix post record company losses, so the CEO resigned and the new guy engaged in a major re-evaluation and re-structuring of the company to figure out what was making money and what wasn't. Fortunately for us and Final Fantasy, FF Versus 13 was deemed an excellent candidate, as were Kingdom Hearts 3 and a FF VII remake. FF Versus 13 was re-branded into a main FF entry, Tetsua Nomura was asked to put together ideas for KH 3 and a FF VII remake, and after about a year to make sure that Hajime Tabata was down with his evolving vision for Versus 13, the former was tasked with the other two games and Hajame was given full direction over XV. This change was largely driven by money, but it wasn't simply a panicked money grab. The CEO and directors understand that making money requires making good products that appease millions of now grown-up fans who have jobs and money. And what a coincidence that both KH 3 and FF VII remake trailers were released in 2014 :).

So the concept has been around from the start, which was a really good idea in my opinion because it gave some atmospheric and gameplay direction to guide the technical people. Then they spent a long time fleshing out the world, working on technical challenges (not just the first open world FF game, but one of the biggest open world games period), entered full production just a few years ago, and are now wanting to avoid the day one patch by getting it into the finished product.

Long development, yes. Development hell, definitely not.