E3 2016: Final Fantasy XV Preview

June 21, 2016

It’s hard to believe after we’ve spent so long waiting for Final Fantasy XV there’s only a few short months to go. After the information blowout at the Final Fantasy XV Uncovered event earlier this year, you wouldn’t have thought there would be much more to reveal, but Square-Enix brought even more to the table at E3. Most surprising was the announcement of a VR demo for the game on PS4 (which Andrew was able to check out – see his preview for details), but a new trailer was also unveiled, as well as a new demo featuring the boss, Titan. 

I attended a presentation by the game’s director, Hajime Tabata, where he went over the game’s design philosophy and some of the new features explored at E3.

First up, he affirmed the game’s mission objective to be ‘Leading Edge’ – not just in the technology of the game but in three key aspects, ‘road trip’, ‘adventure’ and ‘combat. To this end, one of the first scenes in the game involves your character (Noctis) and his bro-team party pushing a car to a rest stop. While you wait for the car to be fixed, you’re allowed to go out and explore the vast world around you. This is one of the first times you’ve been allowed to do this from the outset in a modern Final Fantasy game, to give you a taste of the open world from the get-go.

FFXV_E3_Demo_04

Your companions in the party are designed to interact with you a lot, make comments and generally make you feel as if you’re always in the company of friends, despite playing alone in single player. One aspect of this which Tabata admitted may get annoying, although he hoped players would give the character a chance, is Prompto and his constant taking of photos of the party and their deeds. These photos can actually be seen and reviewed periodically and kept, if you so wish – especially if Prompto managed to get a particularly heroic shot of you during a fight.

Trailers have featured long, rotating shots of the characters driving in their Audi-mobile through their fantasy world, and Tabata confirmed that you have the ability to either drive manually, exploring the world yourself, or set destinations and put the vehicle into autopilot, allowing you to focus on the controlling the camera and taking in the eye candy. The game world is set to expand dramatically once the player has unlocked the ability to drive in the game.

Tabata prefers to refer to the game’s battles as ‘combat’, as it feels a lot more physical than the turn-based skirmishes the series has featured before. The combat is meant to be very easy to pick up and play for newcomers, but allow enough tactical decision making to separate it from other action games. You can select strategies for your comrades, and even use a new feature created as a response to fan feedback – ‘Wait Mode’. Wait Mode freezes time after any action on the battlefield, allowing you a short period of time to select your next target or attack. It’s not quite a return to the turn-based ATB system Final Fantasy is known for, and at this stage does seem like a hastily added-in feature which literally pauses the game for you, but is still an option for series’ fans who are used to a slower pace.

An interesting aspect of the game demoed was how players can gather power from the land and use it to load up and craft magic, like Fire. You can also customise spells in this way, for instance to add a healing effect to a number of Fire casts, so that it heals you while damaging your enemies. It sounds like a wacky version of FFVIII‘s Draw system, although given it wasn’t focused on a great deal, we still don’t have all the in’s and out’s of the system yet.

I was able to go hands-on with the game after the presentation, with the ‘Titan’ demo that was infamously shown at the Microsoft Press Conference, as a poor Square-Enix representative spectacularly failed to play the demo competently. To be fair, having now played the demo, I can kind of see why. While it is an impressive set piece – featuring the giant Titan towering above Noctis, trying to scoop him up like a Colossus from Shadow of the Colossus, it isn’t the best introduction to the game’s controls and gameplay style. For a demo touting this game as the first Final Fantasy for both veterans and newcomers, you’re not given much of an explanation about Noctis’ new abilities, or the fact he can warp away to high vantage points to avoid attacks, or the fact that QuickTime Events involve holding down buttons rather than tapping them (which is the case in almost every other game).

FFXV_E3_Demo_01

As seen in the Microsoft Press Conference demo, you have to parry Titan’s attacks and then use Blizzard magic to freeze him, although only at a certain point once your party has joined you and the demo prompts you to (before this, it doesn’t seem to have much of an effect). The new Weapon Wheel allows you to have three equipped weapons at a time, switching between them at will, as well as one spell slot. On the surface this seems limiting, given how often you’re required to adjust strategies and spells in past Final Fantasy games, but there’s still time to adjust the UI before launch.

While certainly a visually impressive demo, I am still keen to see more insight into the game before launch, as we lead up to the release in September. While not everything shown at E3 landed the way Square-Enix might have hoped it would, there’s still enough spectacular visuals, interesting choices and player-focused additions to make this one of the first Final Fantasy games in a while to really look forward to.