Developer Says Final Fantasy XIII Should Have Launched Sooner

Final Fantasy XIII, the Japanese role playing game from Square Enix, has not managed to live up to the pre-release hype but it seems that despite its clear failings one of the leaders of the team who worked on it believes that it should have been released earlier.

Yoshinori Kitase, who is the leading producer working on Final Fantasy XIII, said, “When you think of Western triple A titles like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Assassin’s Creed, they seem to work with a lot shorter turnaround – they make a new game in one to two years. That is something we need to follow up, because that seems to be the best way to keep our fans interested and attracted to the franchise.”

The executive believes that because XIII is the first game in the series for the current generation of consoles it needed to be out sooner, with specifically designed tech, so that the team could improve and update their engine and their mechanics for a second and a possible third game.

For Square Enix one of the main issues is that they have their own proprietary gaming tech which allows for more customization but also means longer development cycles.

He does not believes adopting the Unreal Engine is a solution, adding, “So all in all it takes much the same effort, the same cost. I think Unreal Engine would be better suited to games such as a FPS, but with an RPG we would have to adapt it to lots of different types of needs. So I think it doesn’t necessarily allow us to cut down on costs really.”

Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be launched in the middle of December in Japan, one month later in the United States and in early February 2012 in Europe.

The developers are promising more freedom, deeper combat and a new story.