Xenoblade Chronicles X will be out in Japan today and even without its various DLC, the game is going to be absolutely huge in scope. In the latest Iwata Asks, both Nintendo and Monolith Soft employees talked about the game’s enormous scale.
Co-director Tetsuya Takahashi started off by saying that, “It’s quite huge. When we started this project, we discussed creating a whole planet for this game. In the end, we created a field that can be developed on a realistic scale by creating five continents around 400km2.”
Co-director Koh Kojima emphasized that you can visit every location you see in the game, and each place houses plenty of content. “We didn’t want to disappoint players with something simple when they put in the effort to go to hard-to-reach locations, so there is a lot of content hidden in various locations.”
Interestingly, even though the main story is somewhat shorter than the first Xenoblade Chronicles and there are the same number of side quests, it has 30 times the amount of extra content as the original. Monolith Soft toook at least “a year and a half” to craft the story and side quests according to Takahashi. “The main story might be shorter than Xenoblade Chronicles. However, the quest stories are matched up with the open-world game design, so there’s more depth to the quests.”
Nintendo’s Genki Yokota further stated that, “It’s very different from Xenoblade Chronicles. If based on the play time, I believe that players can enjoy the game five times longer if they try to complete everything.”
Xenoblade Chronicles X still lacks a release date for the West so stay tuned for more details.