Reports surfaced this past weekend about a delay for long-in-development RPG sequel, Final Fantasy XV, with retailers like Gamestop supposedly instructed to stick new labels over the existing standees that show the September 30th release date. Today, at Gamescom 2016, Square Enix confirmed the news, announcing that Final Fantasy XV has been delayed to November 29th, as reported, and that the delay applies to all regions worldwide.
This news will no doubt be extremely frustrating to avid Final Fantasy fans, considering that Square Enix literally designed an entire event around announcing the game’s former September 30th release date back in March, and that fans have already been waiting a literal decade for Final Fantasy XV to see release. The game was originally announced all the way back in 2006, as a planned PlayStation 3-exclusive spin-off to 2010’s Final Fantasy XIII, called ‘Final Fantasy Versus XIII‘, though the game quickly became too technically ambitious for the PlayStation 3, leading to its move to current-gen consoles, and re-branding as a mainline sequel.
Square Enix attributes the delay to a need to make sure that the game lives up to the enormous expectations that fans have now placed on it, and there certainly are a lot of expectations surrounding Final Fantasy XV, especially after its ultra-lengthy development cycle. Insiders report that the game is fundamentally finished in terms of its gameplay design and progression, though is suffering from a litany of bugs, technical issues and performance struggles. If Square Enix had stuck with the September 30th date, the game would be released in a broken state, and would definitely become a whirlwind of negative PR for Square Enix. It seems prudent then that the company would pick the lesser evil of delaying the game a little longer to smooth out the bugs, rather than deliberately angering fans who are already pretty angry about how long the game has taken to actually release.
Final Fantasy XV is in development for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
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