5/13/2024 0 Comments Final fantasy music boxes“This is the other big advantage beyond the experience we gained working on the main game,” Kujiraoka keenly points out. Because development on the DLCs didn’t start in earnest until after FF16’s June 2023 release date, the team was able to scour for feedback - reading fan impressions, watching live streams, and carefully dissecting player reaction to FF16 in order to figure out exactly how far players and the combat could be pushed with the DLCs. Echoes of the Fallen, released back in December, and Rising Tide, newly released this week. The result is the pair of FF16 DLCs that now round out the game’s experience. But at the same time, we were aware of feedback out there of players saying 'I wanted some more challenging battles, I want something to really sink my teeth into', or 'I wanted a real back-to-back string of consecutive battles as a real challenge', or even 'I just wanted more time controlling Clive and playing as him'.”įINAL FANTASY XVI DLC Trailer - The Rising Tide Clive and his companions journey to Mysidia in the second and final DLC for Final Fantasy 16. “Looking at the proportion of players who managed to complete the main game and reach the end, I do think that was the right choice for the base game. “One of the reasons for that was that we had intentionally kept the difficulty level of the main game at a slightly lower point, because we wanted to make sure that those players who weren't so confident with action gameplay, could enjoy the story and see it right through the end. “For Echoes of the Fallen, we did up the baseline difficulty of the combat as a whole,” Kujiraoka explains. But in creating DLCs aimed at players already in the end-game, the FF16 team were somewhat freed from those constraints, designing for players who will have spent tens of hours getting to grips with Clive, his skill set, and the pace of FF16’s combat. But FF16 is also an unashamed action-RPG, its heaviest influences probably some combination of Devil May Cry and God of War. As a Final Fantasy game, it needed to be accessible and enjoyable to players who might only be used to slower-paced, command-based RPGs. Final Fantasy 16 always had to tread an unenviable tightrope, after all. With developers powered-up, so too are players. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. “I think you can probably tell from the outside as well - that's why we were able to create two sets of DLC on such a short timeline, one in six months, the other in a year.” “When we asked the team to 'just make something new', it meant that in lots of different aspects of the game, whether that was game design, environment, anything like that, we were starting from this powered-up position,” he adds. Like an RPG hero ready for the end-game they were, as he says, ‘powered up’. For the DLC, however, the team was ready. Kujiraoka describes a process of trial-and-error, experimentation, and struggles to get to grips with the platform that inevitably extended FF16’s development. While other teams within Square Enix have been working on PS5 for some time, for FF16’s developers - the thrillingly-named ‘Creative Business Unit 3’ - this was a first-time outing on the platform. “The pace of development for the DLC was a lot faster, a lot smoother.” “Everyone gained a lot of experience, as individuals, through developing the main game,” Kujiraoka says. Placed in charge of finding new adventures for Clive and new challenges for players, one asset was the most invaluable of all: the team was pumped up and ready to deliver. Kujiraoka has stepped into the director’s chair for the post-launch period of Final Fantasy 16, taking over those duties from Hiroshi Takai. But Kujiraoka isn’t talking about Clive and Jill, FF16’s handsome leads - he’s talking about the development team. Power creep is common in games, of course - satisfying progression practically demands that characters become ever more powerful, until you’re swatting away previously deadly enemies. “You can really feel that they’ve all powered up,” enthuses Takeo Kujiraoka, the director of Final Fantasy 16’s DLC. ![]() ![]() Now, with Rising Tide, the Eikon of Water joins Clive’s fight. A game about elemental gods that in the past have been known as Espers, Summons, Eidolons and more, one element was mysteriously missing from FF16’s narrative. With the release of Rising Tide, the world of Final Fantasy 16 is now complete.
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