Xenoblade 2 Not Delayed

[curl-6]

sc94597 said:

curl-6 said:

I dunno, it wasn't just grass, shadowmaps were also visibly drawing in very, very close to the player.

The E3 2014 build of XCX looked practically the same as the finished game as I recall, and that was 9 months out from release. Not that I think XB2 is necessarily that far out, mind you, but to me it didn't looked like a game that will be on shelves in less than six months.

It could possibly be an older build, yes, but at this point I still feel like if I had to break it down, I'd say 40% it comes out this year, 60% next year. Hopefully I'm wrong.

They said in the direct that if E3 were in a few weeks rather than now they'd have full english voices and text rather than some Japanese text in their current build. That is well ahead where Xenoblade Chronicles X was at in 2014 (no localization at all yet.) 

Most of the things you are commenting on are paramaters in the engine that can be changed in a few seconds. The optimization process is the last process in development, where the game is polished for release. If this were a PC game it would already be going gold, because the developers would know PC gamers would tweak such values anyway. Over the months I expect them to get the right balance. If this game is delayed it won't be because it is unfinshed, but for some other reason.

Setting grass and shadow draw distance further out might take the press of a button, but then there's optimising so that the framerate doesn't tank with the increased load.

And that's the other thing, even if the game is finished on time, they might push it back to early 2018 to avoid a Q1/2 game drought; Yoshi, Kirby, and Fire Emblem may not be ready until mid or later next year, leaving a hole that needs to be plugged.