14 DAY TRIAL // Video game publisher Square Enix has officially announced that the old Final Fantasy Versus XIII is not an entirely new FF XV, destined to arrive on the Xbox One home console from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony.
Tetsuya Nomura, the game director who has worked on the project since the initial announcement, tells Famitsu, quoted by Polygon, that a change was first proposed two years after the game had been initially announced but he was unsure about its merits.
Then, Square Enix thought about announcing Final Fantasy XV last year but, Nomura says, “the lifespan of the current generation of consoles was starting to pose a problem to us. If we were a year later, other companies will have more time to research the next generation, and releasing the game against their products on the older generation could have caused us to look inferior when people inevitably compared us.”
Finally, when Microsoft and Sony officially revealed their own plans for next-generation devices, the team decided to make the switch final and an announcement was ready to go in time for E3 2013.
It also seems that Square Enix was also considering current-gen releases for a while, but the differences between the two generations were too big to allow the Final Fantasy XV to exist on both.
Nomura says, “we built an alpha version about a year ago, and the company response was ‘If you remained bound to the current generation, will it be the product you envisioned?’ They suggested shifting fully to next-gen, and that was the spark that led to the move.”
Final Fantasy XV is a third-person action game that will have some shooter elements. For now, the development team is not willing to offer official information about the core narrative.
Launch will probably take place in late 2014.