It will be less than a month now, at the end of May 2023, until Final Fantasy 16 will be released. The developers at Square Enix are confident that the new role-playing game with a very action-heavy approach will be well received by interested gamers and will also function largely without errors. After all, they announced at the beginning of April 2023, more than two months before the release, that FF16 has reached gold status. The folks around Game Producer Naoki Yoshida and Game Director Hiroshi Takai are confident… but not confident enough to announce future plans ahead of the release of Final Fantasy XVI, such as DLC.
But on the contrary. In an interview with GameInformer, Yoshida says that Final Fantasy 16 (buy now for €79.99) will initially stand alone. “We require players to pay full price for this experience and so we want an experience that is worth the money players are paying and we want them to be as satisfied as they paid for. Or even more.”
“We have no idea if people will fall in love with Valisthea and Clive’s story and want to see more of the world and the characters,” Yoshida adds. “So while we’re always considering DLC or spinoffs or things like that where you can learn more about the game, we want to see first if players around the world really want to see more of Valisthea and Clive, and then make that decision meet.”
Anyone who buys Final Fantasy 16 will experience Clive’s story from start to finish. This decision is absolutely made for the player, although it may not be particularly economical. The developers could have made different decisions. The best example of what this “different” looks like and how DLC plans ruthlessly grind a game’s story through the meat grinder also comes from Square Enix. You don’t have to look far at all, just look to the predecessor Final Fantasy 15.
I want fun, I give GaaS
Anyone who knows me knows that I love the universe and lore of Final Fantasy 15 – and that the final game doesn’t live up to the vision of that universe at all. Because someone at Square Enix still believed during the long and arduous development period that the product could be made into a commercial success – or at least wanted to write a black zero under it – the idea of a pseudo-GaaS game was born.
The season pass for a – mind you – single-player role-playing game was not only used to get a little more money out of the game. No, the staggered release of the content also gave the developers enough time to get something halfway decent for the DLCs. But the problem is not that DLCs were announced from the start. No, the problem is that parts of the game were cut out for this. And I still hold that against the decision-makers to this day.
The Mutilation of the Story
Rarely can you experience in a game how clumsy and clumsy content has been cut in order to market it twice. Usually, when planning with a DLC, you introduce a new character or tell a story about a protagonist that works detached from the previous events – in most cases the stories only start after the “end” of the game.
However, Final Fantasy 15, whose main dynamic consists of the protagonist Noctis and his three companions, has had important story parts ripped out to be wrapped in a DLC guise. In the game it is expressed like this: Gladio just disappears for a round of soul searching. Ignis is badly injured in Altissia. Prompto falls off the train on the way to Gralea. When Noctis’ companions rejoin the group after their noticeable absence, there is little to no explanation of their disappearance and reappearance. It’s just like that. And yes, that still bothers me.
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Of course, just because no DLCs are planned for Final Fantasy 16 yet doesn’t mean that the role-playing game is doing everything right. But at least until release (and hopefully beyond) I have the assurance that the story hasn’t been wantonly chopped up to put an extra price tag on potentially immersive and atmospheric content. It remains to be seen whether Final Fantasy 16 will live up to expectations. But at least there seems little potential for failure up front.
