Xenoblade 2 Not Delayed

[Jumpin]

curl-6 said:

Nuvendil said:

If any game from this year were to move to next year, it would be Fire Emblem Warriors imo.  Not only is it niche, its also relatively unremarkable from an objective stance.

An epic RPG taking place in massive open spaces set on the backs of enormous creatures that endlessly roam a sea of clouds?  THAT is marketable in an agressive market.  And with s bit more polish, the visuals will look very nice and for this to run on a 6" tablet will be regarded as very impressive.

Fire Emblem Warriors is...a Warriors game.  With Fire Emblem characters.  It will do well enough, but that's not going to draw the eye of any non-FE fans.  Yeah, Hyrule Warriors did rather well for a Warriors game but let's not kid ourselves, Zelda is much more mainstream than FE, on top of being closer in gameplay to Warriors than FE is, making the difference more palatable even if it's still a vastly different game.

So yeah, I could see them move FE Warriors to fill a hole, but not XC2.  Now, they still have to do right by XC2.  I have said many times the franchise has far greater sales potential than has been exploited and I still think that holds true here but they've gotta market it.  With XCX they did a lot of build up and then fumbled at the 1 yard line, hopefully that doesn't happen again.

Most epic RPGs that sell gangbusters these days are Western though. JRPGs not called "Final Fantasy" don't tend to do so hot anymore, and outside of Nintendo enthusiasts, Xenoblade isn't a name with a lot of brand recognition.

I'm not saying it's a lost cause, just that it's not really a Christmas tentpole kind of game. For that you want a game that's going to sell 4+ million and make hordes of people run out to buy the system it's on. Odyssey is that kind of game, Xenoblade isn't.

The top selling game of 2016 was an RPG from Japan that outsold FF15 by more than three times.

"RPG" in the west has become more of a marketing term rather than a label for games in the RPG genre. Most of them are primarily action adventure games that utilize very little in the way of RPG mechanics.