Were you one of the many Final Fantasy XV fans disappointed with the game’s lacklustre showing at this year’s Gamescom? Square Enix had stated around the time of this year’s E3 that the fifteenth iteration of the fan-favourite series would be skipping the North American event for Gamescom, but what resulted didn’t exactly live up to expectations.
The game’s director, Hajime Tabata has heard the discontent and responded to it in an interview with Eurogamer:
We looked at the reactions to yesterday’s ATR, and we understand that people expected a big information update at Gamescom, and we do understand that we really disappointed people, and we’re really regretful about that.
There was a big gap between our perceptions of what people should be doing and what people expected. And we realised that very quickly after the reaction!
However, it’s not all bad news. In an attempt to placate disgruntled gamers, Tabata came out with the statement that Final Fantasy XV will, in fact, be releasing in 2016, bordering on outright promising it.
We really wanted to say something else, so we’ve got something we’d like to say – you won’t be waiting until 2017. We want to get that across. We want to reassure people that we are going to get it out.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a games developer has promised a release date only to later make a U-turn on said promise, but we’ll just have to wait and see how the whole thing plays out. Final Fantasy XV has been 10 years in the making, so we’ve all already been waiting a pretty substantial amount of time.