The future of Final Fantasy XV

Confirmed yesterday by the director of Final Fantasy XV, Hajime Tabata, the latest installment to the popular franchise is set to receive ongoing updates post launch. In his own words on the Square Enix blog;

“We want you to enjoy Final Fantasy XV for a long time to come. We have been listening to your ideas on how to make the game experience even better, and so in addition to the previously announced content, we’ll be providing free updates to the game throughout the coming year.”

The plans, at this stage, are to:

• Enhance Chapter 13
• Add additional scenes into the game to given insight into some of the characters
• Making certain key characters playable
• Adding in customisable avatars
• New game plus / different play modes

I’m not going to comment too much in this news article given that our review of FFXV will be happening live on air on Saturday, however, I welcome all but the first two options. Having cleared the main story line, I hope that these don’t change anything too dramatically, even though a second play-through is definitely on my agenda. The prospect of a new game plus is great news for anyone in the same boat.

Where Square Enix is going to go wrong, and downright enrage fans, is if they decide to charge for the additional DLCs called:

• FFVXV Episode Gladiolus (tentative name)
• FFXV Episode Ignis (tentative name)
• FFXV Episode Prompto (tentative name)

In the interest of filling in the blanks of the game this will be a very bad move, as it is more than reasonable to expect that this content was in development for the main release, but delayed for whatever reason. Anything that completes the story line that wasn’t included in the original release should be made accessible for free, and I feel that Square Enix will suffer some incredible backlash if this doesn’t occur.