Tales of Arise Developer Interview – Postponement of Plans, Combat Balance and More

A recent interview with numerous members of the Tales of Arise development team has recently been uploaded onto Bandai Namco’s Japanese website. The interview has been separated into two halves, with the second releasing at a later date.

Thanks to noisypixel.net’s very own Ryuji, we now have a translated version of the first half of the interview.

Postponement of Plans Due to Next-Gen Hardware

The original plan was to release Tales of Arise in 2020, and indeed, development had pretty much concluded in time for that original scheduling, but then the game released in September 2021, so what’s up with that? 

Well, in 2020, the developers had discussed the need to support the upcoming next-gen consoles. That is, the Xbox Series X|S and the PlayStation 5. They felt that those consoles were an integral point for Tales of Arise. It was a large-scale title, so there was a lot of back-and-forth within Bandai Namco about when they should release the game. 

And that is when Shouji Ikegami joined the project. Since it would’ve been impossible to develop the next-gen version simultaneously with the current-gen one, he created a specific team to do just that.

Overall, it was a difficult call to make, especially with such a tall order of enhancing the graphics while still making sure that the current-gen version wasn’t severely inferior to the next-gen release. Still, though tired, the development team persisted and they’re really happy that they marched on with that decision.

You can read the full half of the interview translated over at noisypixel here, along with the second half of the interview when it becomes available.

For those that haven’t had the chance to play Tales of Arise yet, the game has launched worldwide on Xbox Series S|X, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.

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