Final Fantasy XV Director: Development time and costs would have doubled if the game was entirely open-world

Hajime Tabata was put in one of the toughest spots in the industry when he took the helm on Final Fantasy XV away from the legendary Square developer Tetsuya Nomura. Nomura is something of a God to the Final Fantasy faithful, and to be fair he's earned it through years of quality work. Unfortunately, the same did not happen with Final Fantasy XV, although few fans will admit it. Tabata took over what was essentially a whole lot of nothing from Nomura and, with the hard working devs at Square Enix, managed to cobble together a mostly open-world JRPG that's actually pretty good.

If you've played the game, you know why I say "mostly." The back half of Final Fantasy XV is well known to be curiously linear, a decision that Tabata says to this day was entirely intentional. According to a recent interview with Game Informer, it doesn't seem so much intentional from a creative standpoint as it was forced by time and financial restrictions.

He said:

"Based on calculations that the development time and cost would double if the latter half of the game was to be an open-world environment as well, we had already planned to make the latter half more of a journey by vehicle. The structure of this title – to create memories while traveling in the open-world environment during the first half of the game, then have the story move forward linearly using the train in the latter half of the game – was designed and intended to be that way."

Tabata also talked at length about some of the perceived awkwardness behind the game's narrative, mostly due to the fact that a lot of things happened off-screen. Once again, he says everything was designed intentionally, though I can't help but think money and time played a big part in that as well.

Tabata said:

"The world and the events that Noctis sees are merely things that are seen through his eyes. We didn’t want to create a comprehensive and perfectly balanced story in this game. Instead, we placed importance on the main characters and for the player and Noctis to share the same experience when we tell the story."

All in all, I think Tabata made the best of a bad situation, and all things considered in that regard, Final Fantasy XV is a success. Given that the game made all its money back on release day, I'd say Tabata earned himself a raise.

Source: [Game Informer via Nova Crystallis]