Final Fantasy 15 Criticism Is A Reason Final Fantasy 16 Isn’t An Open World Game
After playing several hours of Final Fantasy XVI in Square Enix’s Tokyo, Japan, offices for this month’s cover story, I spend about 20 minutes in one of the game’s various open field areas. FFXVI isn’t an open world game, but it features several large areas where players, as Clive, are free to explore the location, fight monsters, pick up side quests, find treasure, and more.
I spend about 20 minutes checking out every nook and cranny of one of the earlier open field locations in the game. After that, I check my map to see how much I had covered in the area I was permitted to explore – it was about an eighth, which is to say these zones are massive. But much of the game occurs in focused, dungeon-esque missions where players make their way through more linear areas, defeating monsters and bosses along the way.
After playing through this, I asked producer Naoki Yoshida why the team opted for open fields rather than a full open world game, especially in a time when the style is more popular than ever. One of the more surprising reasons is 2016’s Final Fantasy XV.
“If we look back at Final Fantasy XV, a lot of the criticism about that game was kind of centered on the story,” Yoshida says before listing out some of the criticism. “‘Some of the storytelling elements weren’t as good as they could have been,’ or, ‘Towards the end, the story kind of loses its focus,’ or, ‘We have this story that needs to be told in DLC’ and then that DLC gets canceled so it can’t be told.
“So there are lots of problems there with the storytelling that we find. And for Final Fantasy XVI, we wanted to make sure that again, our focus [is] on storytelling […] so that we can cover those gaps that [FFXV] had.”
Yoshida says he and the team, as
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