Xenoblade 2 Not Delayed

[TK14]

curl-6 said:

TK14 said:

To be fair, Monolith Soft has two separate teams, and the team working on Xenoblade 2 was supposedly working on it at the same time XCX was still in development. 

Their Kyoto studio seems to pretty much only help out with other Nintendo projects though, like Pikmin 3, Animal Crossing, Zelda, etc.

Was it ever confirmed that work on XB2 started before XCX wrapped?

Not sure, to be honest. Just what I remember reading/hearing. It made sense though, since they definitely expanded during XCX development. But could be that that studio is just a smaller addition for support on Nintendo's first party stuff. The fact that they even DARED to label X2 as 2017 in the first place seemed to imply the game is pretty far along (given that the music recording is happening in earnest the past few months too, which is usually late in development), and in order for it to ever have been a possible 2017 release in their minds, surely it must have been started before XCX production wrapped in late 2014/early 2015 for the Japanese version?

A lot of assumptions being made both ways, I suppose. Or is it possible that the game is just smaller in scope than people are expecting? Or simply more linear and sequential like the first game (which the numbered title seems to suggest), versus XCX's truly open world? Personally I'm expecting it to play out more like the first game, with large areas, but possibly loading between them or just like narrow connections between them. Or maybe we'll be traveling in the sky on that airship city thing? Just a lot we don't know about the game. The first teaser definitely looked more in line with the original though, and I don't mean this in a bad way, but it looked less 'ambitious' and 'graphically intensive/impressive' than XCX, to me.

It's also worth noting that Nintendo has been making a VERY conscious effort to release games worldwide around the same time, compared to a few years ago, even. Fire Emblem, for example, used to be a year or more apart, but Echoes came just a month later, with FULL voice acting localization. Surely Xenoblade 2 is even MORE of a priority. Mario doesn't require much localization, a lot of other Switch games are ports, ARMS and Splatoon come out a lot sooner, and Zelda's done other than the DLC, so I imagine Xenoblade 2 is one of the big priorities for Treehouse right now. So I don't think it's a 'given' that Japan will get it 6 months or more before everywhere else this time. A month or two maybe, I could see. But February 2018 wouldn't be a 'bad delay' at all, still so soon, especially after being announced just in January, and for what will hopefully be another 100+ hour epic!