I don't like Kingdom Hearts, that's just not for me. So I don't know what happens in this saga.

While the FF series has also become hit-or-miss for me, I like FF7R so far and I haven't played FF15. But the fact that I didn't feel like playing FF15 yet says a lot about my excitement for the series. Considering it was a franchise that I had to play Day 1 no matter what prior to FF13. (And I wasn't too big of a fan of FF12 either.)

That said, I haven't even played FF14, but if there is one director on this planet I trust to not release a wildely unfinished game, it's the FF14 director Yoshi P.



This is a very interesting watch. Not just because it details how he was brought in to salvage the mess that was FF14 1.0, and the way he did it to turn it into one of SE's most profitable and criticallt aclaimed games ever.
But it goes over a lot about what was going on in Square Enix at the time. He explains why he thinks SE became arrogant after the PS2 era for example.

The FF14 team definitely has some of the most talented and dedicated people in the business.
Their composer Soken for example composed tracks while going through painful cancer treatment from his hospital bed, without telling anyone on the team about it.

If the game will be my cup of team remains to be seen. but I have zero concerns about it being rushed out too early.
I don't think it will be flawless at release, but I doubt it's going to be anything close to a mess. 

Speaking of which, I don't recall people actually tresting Cyberpunk early builds? I remember there being a screening for a select audience years (?) before it realesed, and then when it was close to release they didn't send out review codes to a lot of people, and put the review embargo on the release day, iirc.

In this case, SE are letting people test the game close to release, and are being open about which are earlier builds and which are later builds, as people got to test sections of the game based on various builds as I heard Max explain in one of the vids in the OP.

~Edit~

Adding further credence to this:

And the game went Gold on March 31.

Yeah, after all these years it somewhen just was not in the cards anymore for ff15. Trailers looked so incredibly promising, that I feel incredibly stupid for believing them. And I never thought about the smart phone stuff. My god, how tone def can your writing get?

I never played Xenoblade, but frim what you are saying, perhaps I should give it a try.

Budget wise, marketing and graphics fidelity wise I guess because from what has been discussed, FFXVI takes back a much linear approach to it's traversing design. Much more focused. Which is good because we know how meddling it turned out for the last mainline FF.

Xenoblade Chronicles since it's debut has been a monolithic of the open world genre, although technically they work more so with big open space areas. Big but tightly design and a sense of scale few can meet.

Not only that, but the stories in themselves are amongst the longest you'd find in the RPG genre nowadays. So there's no lack of ambitions on what they do.

In some ways, I think both series aspire in similar ways to push aspects of the medium forward ambitiously. It's just that one of them has more capital and technological horse behind it than the other for obvious reasons when you look at the respective platforms they are on.

Hype.

The word of mouth because of these streamers will be sick

The story parts were intreguing and the gameplay of the demo was good when you were allowed to play, but as a demo for a game, I thought it was pretty bad. Too many cutscenes and one bit you played was just a rail shooter. It needs to get into the game quicker. You know that first mission to kill goblyns? Why wasn't that the start of the game, then your side people can explain plot points and give you instructions on how to play, not just a slow paced arena battle where you are told to press square a few times? I know how to attack, it's basics of playing video games.

Because it's the full prologue, not a cut-down sales pitch like your average demo, and this being a FF game the story is an essential part of it.

Compare how many people out there are commenting and showering praise on the prologue as opposed to the Eikonic Challenge demo, which is basically only what you wanted instead. It was a stroke of genius to allow people to play it in full.

That being said, I'd probably have cut the intro battle from the whole thing, because it makes the game feel like it has many preludes on top of one another, almost like a slow-paced, middle-of-the-series fantasy book. But that's a nitpick and doesn't detract from the whole thing.

I legit think the story and spectacle is the main selling point of the game. The whole presentation including music is on another level...  The action RPG element isn't especially unique. The goblin hunting section was just fine, no real depth to combat this early on

The Eikon battles were.... Interesting. They'll probably all be trash gameplay wise but the thrill of the presentation makes up for it