“Final Fantasy XV” was rumored to be an open-world game for some time now, and various reports indicated that players will have a lot of freedom in its gameplay. However, it was recently revealed that the free-roaming style will only apply to the first half of the game, and after that the story will take a more linear path. It’s not clear if there will be an obvious separation between the two styles, or if they will be mixed to some extent throughout the game, but most players are leaning towards the latter option.
It will be interesting to see how the developers have tackled this, and what kinds of improvements it could bring to the core formula of the franchise. “Final Fantasy” has gone through various changes during its lifetime, and fans of the series are quite excited to see what the developers have come up with for this game, after so many rumors about interesting new features.
According to the developers themselves, the restricting of the gameplay in the second half of the game is intentional so that players don’t get bored with the openness. This makes sense, as open-world games can quickly get unwieldy without some clear sense of direction, and that’s likely what the designers are trying to provide with their system.
Plus, fans of the franchise are no strangers to linear gameplay, so they should have no problem falling back to that style once they’ve gone past the first half of the game. We don’t know if the second half will be entirely linear, or if there will be some reversal towards the end, but we suspect the former. It would make sense for the storytelling to become more and more constricted as players are approaching the end of the plot, and that’s probably part of the developers’ plan as well.
It’s not the first time the developers of the franchise have attempted something similar either, as we saw something like that in “Final Fantasy XIII”. Although, back then the system was more or less in reverse, with the game opening up in a linear style, and progressing towards a more open-ended gameplay with free roaming. Reception to that title was positive, and players enjoyed the world design in particular, so the system could still have a lot of merit in the upcoming sequel.
Players have been wondering about the length of the game as well. Talking about openness and level design doesn’t mean much without any context for the duration of the experience. Reports indicate that “Final Fantasy XV” will be about 40-50 hours long, which should be more than enough for most fans of the series. It’s a pretty good duration for a story-driven RPG, and it should be just about right to prevent players from getting tired of the game.
After all, just because a game offers hundreds of hours of gameplay doesn’t mean it’s all interesting, and some RPGs have the tendency to include a lot of repetitive grinding just to artificially boost their length. We’ve never seen that with “Final Fantasy” before, so we trust that those 40-50 hours will be full of fun, exciting moments, and the game will always feel fresh and unique. Of course, this also depends on the variety of its gameplay, but we’ve already seen plenty of previews for that which have given us a lot of hope.