Players have been waiting more than a decade for Final Fantasy XV, and it looked like the game's release date was at long last set in stone when Square Enix threw a massive press event just for the occasion. Recent news of yet another two-month delay for the heavily anticipated title, however, has no doubt made more than a few fans of the series sad.
It's definitely a bit of a bummer, but Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata has a good reason for the title being delayed, one that actually sounds like it has the best interest of players at heart. If the game was to release in September as originally planned, Tabata tells IGN Final Fantasy XV would have needed a "hefty" day one patch for players to download in order for the game to run as intended.
That, of course, is nothing unusual. Day one patches of several GBs are common practice in the game industry nowadays, but Tabata says he began to think about what a day one patch meant for players who choose to play games offline without an internet connection.
"Originally I was thinking it would be OK and we could put all of the extra updates into a day one patch," Tabata says. "But at that point I learned there are maybe a lot of people out there who play in an offline environment and don't have internet. When I found that out, thinking about it again, I'm glad I didn't make that decision."
This way, offline players would be able to play the optimal version of the game, without having to find a way to download several GBs' worth of updates. Once the decision to delay was made, it was calculated that roughly two months would be enough time to implement all the updates needed.
"It would take about one month exactly to fit everything we wanted in the day one patch into the disc version," he says. "And with that, pretty much all of the technical issues would be sorted out. And then we thought that after we got that technical base down and there were no problems there, it's one more month to polish everything up and get it really great. And that's why it was two months."
Delaying a game is a huge business decision. Delays happen for a whole variety of reasons, but it's rare to hear of a major game being pushed back simply because the developers wanted offline players to be able to play the best game possible. It's a refreshing explanation, and one that should make more than a few players happy, whether they play offline or not.
