The timeline of development following Final Fantasy XV has been a long and troubled one. Having gone through a number of major restructures, as well as a couple of name changes, the Square Enix-developed game had many people believing that it would never actually see the light of day. E3 2013 rolled around and gamers were finally given a taste of what had been lurking behind closed doors for so long. While not quite the devastatingly epic preview we were hoping for, the game still appeared to be strong in both gameplay and graphics. The design was still very similar to the Kingdom Hearts franchise, which Square Enix had said would be the case.
While Final Fantasy XV barely made a peep at this year's E3, it had quite the showing at Tokyo Game Show 2014. A host of new details regarding the game have been made public, and things look to have shifted quite dramatically over the past year. Square Enix has ditched some of the Kingdom Hearts elements and instead opted for a more traditional Final Fantasy user interface. That said, it appears that the game will still operate in a more action-oriented sense, which does separate it from both sides of the fence, gameplay-wise.
You can find a post on Nova Crystallis here, complete with GIF images of the game supposedly taken from TGS 2014. There is a ton of information regarding various facets of the game and its inner workings.
Here is a quick taste of what you can expect past the link:
- The party consists of 4 characters.
- Only Noctis can be controlled in the demo – Episode DUSCAE
- Characters gain the day’s earned experience when they sleep (camp). If they do not sleep, their performance in battle degrades.
- The world map can be traversed using Cars, Chocobos and other means of transport.
- The car can be controlled manually, or left to the AI to go from point A to point B.
- The game has a fully dynamic day night cycle, and a day is about 30 mins in real world time. (This may be tweaked in the final game however)
- Stronger monsters appear at night time.
- The game also has a weather system, and affects the gameplay and appearance of the characters. For example, characters’ clothes appear wet in the rain.
- When on low health, Noctis’s movements suffer.