Final Fantasy 15 may be nearing its launch, but it is still very much a work in progress, and work on the game continues still. In an interview with Kotaku, Square Enix’s Hajime Tabata, the director on the game, explained how the UI of the game, as well as the behavior of the NPCs, still need to be worked on.
“We’re gonna do one final round of brushing up to improve the usability, playability of the UI,” Tabata said. “We’re doing a little bit of brushing up of the NPCs too. We felt there was a lack of reality in some of the NPCs—they were still mockups a lot of them—so we’re brushing them up too.”
He also explained that final optimization work needs to be done on the game- although he admitted that this remains an issue so far, especially since the team doesn’t want to compromise on its vision to make things work.
“I’m not gonna lie, that is a very difficult thing,” Tabata conceded. “It’s hard work. It’s troubling us doing that. If we just said ‘we’re gonna cut this off to make it better,’ that could be quite easy, but we really don’t want to do that. We’ve been keeping some people waiting about ten years for this game now, so we really don’t want to cut anything. For example, we could take away the number of enemies who appear at once or cut down the number of effects on screen—it would be very easy to optimize it then, but we don’t want to do that.”
Well, let’s just hope the final game is in a better playable state than either demo has been so far- whereas I am pretty hyped for the title, it has so far not inspired confidence.
Final Fantasy 15 launches on PS4 and Xbox One on September 30.
