Dragon Quest 11 is going to be the first console game in the series since Dragon Quest 8, all the way back in 2005- as a result, it will also be one of the first and only traditional console JRPGs to be hitting the PS4 this generation. Like many JRPGs, it has a cast open world, turn based battles, and a charming storyline for the player to follow. Unlike other JRPGs of today’s day and age, however, Dragon Quest 11 has resisted the move to an open world.
That’s because the development team wanted to focus their resources on the game’s story, says Yuji Horii, the creator of the franchise, who also wrote the scenario for Dragon Quest 11.”If you’re going for a completely open world, there’s obviously a development cost attached to that, affecting where you spend your time and effort,” Horii said to EDGE in their May issue (#318) in an interview with them. “If you want to, for example, go fishing somewhere, then you have to put a lot of effort into developing a fishing system. I felt that rather than spread our effort across a breadth of things, we’d rather concentrate everything on the story. I felt that was a much better use of our time.”
Of course, Dragon Quest 11 will still not be a linear game- as noted above, it has a full overworld, which will be packed with towns, dungeons, monsters, secrets, and quests in the vein of classic RPGs. It just won’t have a modern open world is all. Dragon Quest 11 launches in the west this September on PS4 and PC, with a Switch version coming later.
You can check out the full story for the game and get more information in EDGE’s May issue. You can subscribe to the latest issue here.