Note: Minor spoilers throughout. Nothing too major will be given away in the plot for this game, but some vague descriptions of the direction the gameplay and story take in FFXV will be present. Additionally, some suggestions that do go in depth on story spoilers for FFXV will be inside a spoiler tag. With that said, the comments section has become full of spoilers. Finally, keep in mind that this is all my opinion.
I will fully admit I was looking forward to FFXV. I've never been a huge fan of combat systems that attempt to merge turn based and real time combat, and result in the player trying to hurredly navigate a set of Microsoft drop down menus in the middle of the action. As a result, I wanted to see what an RPG could do if they tried to impelement a more traditional form of real time combat. And while the combat is definitely on the simplistic side, it's a step in the right direction. Fighting enemies is actually enjoyable, while the open world and team combat lends itself to a feeling of exploring the wilderness with a group of friends. There's even a Monster Hunter-esque feel that comes from the various animal killing sidequests scattered throughout restaurants. It's definitely enjoyable.
...which is why I was left utterly stunned that the open world essentially disappears from the halfway point onward, and the group consistently has members subtracted and readded as the game progresses. There's even one particularly obnoxious chapter that not only separates you from your teammates, but from your weapons as well. FFXV largely sold itself on its open world and its revamped combat system; taking them both away for long periods of time is entirely counterintuitive. While this mission has been acknowledged by the developer as tedious and there is currently a patch in the works to make it less so, it does beg the question...why was this considered a good idea in the first place?
The obvious answer is for the story. The story, as it stands, requires that certain members not be present for various portions of the game, and that Noctis' ability to fight be stipped from him as well. And this is where I think FFXV should teach the entire industry an important lesson; it is of the upmost importance that your narrative fit with the gameplay. If your core gameplay features are a big open world and lots of exploration, it's probably not best for the second half of your story to demand consistent changes in setting and small, linear areas. FFXV ignores this principle wholesale by taking the open world away from the player at the halfway point, and then consistently changing the dynamics of combat, either by taking away various members of the group for story reasons or drastically revamping Noctis' ability to fight from something that felt like a simplistic hack and slash to an extremely slow paced third person shooter crossed with stealth gameplay. In small doses, a drastic change in the core gameplay mechanics can work well. But a game should not revamp its entire core gameplay for extended periods of time, let alone the latter half of the game. There are two important reasons why games should avoid this sort of thing.
#1: It simply takes much of the fun out of the game. A game is built on its core mechanics, and removing them for long periods of time is going to cause the gameplay to suffer.
#2: It diminishes a sense of progression and is arbitrarily unfair for the player. Much of the satisfaction gained from playing a game like FFXV is the sense of progression. If, say, for instance, you've been putting most of your AP into leveling up skills that are only useful in the open world, or only useful when certain teammates are around, then you are at a disadvantage when the game takes those away. What good is improving a certain skill when you will hardly be able to use it in the second half of the game?
I'm not sure whether the narrative was written for the game before the developers knew what the core gameplay mechanics would be, but it's not particularly important. If the narrative was written beforehand, it should have been drastically altered once the developers knew what kind of game they were working with. If the narrative was written after, then the developers should have recognized how disruptive this would be for the gameplay, and should have made story changes as necessary. While these are by no means small changes, they don't require the story to be completely rewritten. Here is one (very spoiler heavy) way in which the narrative of the latter half of the game could have been written in order to better suit the gameplay at hand.
Have the chancellor recover Luna's power at the end of Chapter 9. With the rite disrupted, the world continues as it would have before, with daemons becoming more powerful as the game continues and days consistently growing shorter. This has the additional benefit of the story informing gameplay in a positive way; the player is directly shown how dangerous the world is becoming by being forced to deal with stronger daemons at night, or else resign themselves to a very short active cycle in the day. The open world fully opens up, and the much of the remaining game is spent hunting down daemons or other enemies that hold the power Noctis needs to confront Ardyn, before the final battle takes place in Chapter 15. Daemons running amok would begin to replace the empire as the main threat, and perhaps even begin to possess some of their stronger members (providing an explanation for what happened to Ravus). Perhaps most importantly, it allows the player to actively watch as the world begins to literally descend into darkness, instead of having a ten year timeskip just before the final boss where a bunch of important character development happens off screen.
I'm sure an actual story team could do a much better job with this, but I think the point is clear; the general gist of the story isn't incompatible with the core gameplay mechanics. The atmosphere of doom and helplessness that the second half of the game wants to impose upon the player is still very much possible within the open world. Certain events have to be rewritten, but the general direction of the story is still intact. Above all else, it still maintains the same type of gameplay, and even allows for various previously established elements to be built upon with strong narrative reasons behind them.
The ultimate point is that having a story that is compatible with your gameplay is extremely important, and rarely impossible; though developers do need to be creative to allow the two to work well together. And if a game simply cannot work well with the intended story, then it's worth asking if this is the story that should be told with this type of game, or alternatively if this is the right type of gameplay to tell that story. Future games would do well to reconcile story and gameplay as much as possible.
