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.
I've waited this long. I can wait a few more months. Being a software engineer myself, I can appreciate the complexity of an absurdly large program like this, so I am willing to wait for the latest bug fixes to undergo proper review and go gold. Perhaps it is better that it release near the end of the fall semester rather than the beginning (unless you want to complete your finals).
@Netret0120: "FF7,10 took less than 3 years to make"
One does not simply make a large scale RPG. The open-world tech alone looks to be giving Witcher 3 a run for its money. The technical complexity and visual detail of this game are to FF7,10 as the Boeing 787 is to a Cessna.
One of my former co-workers got a job at Magic Leap. They are approaching AR with eye projection (that is, a video projected straight onto the eye), which makes for a very lightweight headset. I'm looking forward to that.
That thing in the basement? A little horror jump scare getting in. I like what I see, but I hope that the lack of music was simply due to it being a demo build.
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