To be honest, the setting of “Final Fantasy 15” is not that mature. The semi-open world setting of the game’s main area, Duscae, offers some cool farting opportunities for Noctis and his cohorts as the world around them literally falls apart, but the core of the game exists only in areas inspired by Middle America, in There are just some pretty normal (literally) story beats after the initial area.
Still, the developers of Final Fantasy XVI appear to have learned from the mistakes of their controversial predecessor for this massive new RPG experiment.In a hands-on preview event with Square Enix and the developers behind it final fantasy 16the studio confirmed that Final Fantasy 16 will not be an open world.
“In past interviews, I mentioned that Final Fantasy XVI is not an open world game,” producer Naoki Yoshida said through a translator. “But what exactly does that mean? Does that mean it’s linear? Again, not quite.
“In order to bring players a variety of environments with the highest possible quality and ultimately enhance the gameplay experience, we picked a few areas that we wanted to focus on – and created them in an extremely detailed manner.”
Yoshida points out that the world is still large–but also very detailed. In a video (and later, during our own hands-on with the game), we get a sense of what that means. There’s a lot of graphical fidelity – personally I think the visuals and effects shown in this game represent the proper start of a new generation and it’s impressive – even though we just had a whistle tour of the game in a quick video, I What I saw reminded me of old Final Fantasy.
There were huge populated towns, imposing caves and dungeons, and we were promised vast areas to explore once the game was in our hands. I wasn’t expecting the freedom that Elden Ring has here, the game isn’t open world after all, but the detail and fidelity of what we’ve seen so far matches what FromSoft is doing in its 2022 blockbuster – maybe even exceeds it.
“We wanted to take full advantage of the power of the PlayStation 5 to create an incredibly detailed world that is only possible in video games,” Yoshida continued. He explained that when developing the game, the focus on visuals was one of the four pillars the team focused on and kept coming back to. The others, by the way, are the narrative, characters, and combat.
Yoshida’s “extreme detail” notes? It’s not just news talk. The demo I played took place in a medieval-style castle; a proper European event with huge, jagged stone slabs. Curtain walls, arrow slots, gates and everything else. Cast a fire spell and see a warm orange glow illuminate the cobblestone floor. See how the red lighting plays against the green moss growing from cracks in the walls.
Step outside and watch how the rain beats the cobblestones, making them shiny and smooth, like lightning slashing the sky and illuminating the tumbling rocks of the fallen towers. Heavy iron doors with twisted and gnarled metal catch the light of enemy torches, banners hang from the walls of a canteen, and heavy oak tables tumble out of your way in battle. By linearizing some parts of this game, Square Enix is pretty much taking advantage of how pre-rendered backgrounds worked in PS1-era FF games – the screen-to-screen stuff looks as stunning as the cutscenes (which is the best because there are 11 hours).
It’s easy to see what Yoshida said in that sentence and roll his eyes and say “yes, sure, we’ve heard that before”. But from what I’ve seen and played with the game so far, I truly believe this feels like last year’s Final Fantasy; a graphic and technical masterpiece that has the potential to set the tone for generations to come. I’m excited about Final Fantasy XVI, and I think you should be too.
Final Fantasy XVI will be released on PlayStation 5 on June 22, 2023.
