Final Fantasy XV: "A world you always want to see more of"

Last week, we were lucky enough to go to the Final Fantasy XV Uncovered event in Los Angeles and speak to Hajime Tabata, the game director for the upcoming Final Fantasy XV. We had loads to ask him; about both the game and his history with the Final Fantasy series.

One of the first questions we asked Tabata was about the differences between the Western and Japanese audiences, and how the studio is trying to make a game with worldwide appeal, not just to a certain region. Tabata explained how his team has learned from past experiences:

"Previously, we'd generally just create what we wanted to create and put our efforts into making what was the best content we could, then we'd provide that to the whole world and get a lot of different reactions and responses from people around the world. That was something that we weren't aware of the problems of before so we're looking at addressing that in the future and with FFXV, so we don't fall into that kind of trap again."

"The element of Final Fantasy that makes it a hit worldwide is attempt to challenge new things every single time, to try out new ideas and push the boat out. That spirit of how Final Fantasy is made is something that really resonates around the world regardless of where they are from."

One of the biggest worries from us, and surely many others, about the game was that such a vast game with a massive open world could get quite stale very quickly if there isn't enough to do; we've seen games devolve into fetch-quest after fetch-quest. Tabata assured us that the sense of exploration that Final Fantasy XV creates will keep the game interesting for a long time to come:

"What I try and do is create a world you always want to see more of, from what you've seen, you'll think 'what's beyond there, what can I see next,' to create that kind of world. I think one of the big motivations for people playing through games to continue playing is that feeling of 'I want to see what comes next' and that feeling of wonder when you enter a new area and you think 'wow, what is this place' that's one of the things I really value, to create that emotion we've worked very hard on creating all the locations."

On a similar note, we also asked Tabata about how the open world will function, and whether it will be all one open world or split up into separate entities, and we also learned a little about what the world will be like.

"The open world areas, they all have their own individual characteristics, they are very much split so seamlessly you move from what to the other they all have their own individual atmospheres. The second part of the game there is a large area where you travel by train and that's slightly different in the way you explore, that's slightly different from the open world."

One of the things that is a worry for a lot of people excited for the game is that current-generation hardware may struggle to run it at a stable frame-rate. An inventive way that the development team has gotten around this is by including something called 'dynamic resolution':

"It detects when there will be an overburdening on the graphical processing or resolution processing, and when that would interfere with the gameplay, for example when you land an attack in a certain way and there's too much processing it reduces the burden so it doesn't interfere and make the gameplay feel different. When that processing really becomes useful is in the battle scenes when you are doing lots of rapid commands, and its outputting the results of those commands in real time that's when the pressure starts to mount. In actual fact, during the summoning sequences, for example when Titan reaches down and picks up Noctus in his hand, that's not such a burden on the processing so it's not actually as necessary in those situations."

You can check out our full interview below. Final Fantasy XV will be available for Xbox One and PS4 from September 30, and a pretty lengthy demo of the game is available for download on both consoles right now.