Final Fantasy XV (was Versus XIII)

[X-SOLDIER]

Ardyn is set to release in March.

Additionally, there're trailers for that and Comrades that they've shown that I expect to be officially online shortly, and they both look AMAZING. Also, they're making a new animation for episode Ardyn to serve as a prologue for it as well.

Makes me even more gutted about the cancelled projects. That being said, they did mention that they're looking into a way to still deliver the story that they wanted to tell in the other 3 DLCs via another means that they're going to cover later, which I'll keep looking forward to. If I had to guess, they might take the animation route with them, since they're premiering the Ardyn animation in Japan at a Kingsglaive showing event.

EDIT: Here's the stream video to scrub through until they're up officially.
Ardyn: 13:27
Comrades 16:50
FFXIV crossover 22:30

X

 

[Kai Schulen]

Jesus, Jenova and Shiva, I was really looking forward to Aranea and Lunafreya's DLC. ;_;

 

[Lex]

I think this deserves its own thread, I'll go make one.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Same here. I'm REALLY glad that they're still committed to telling the story that they'd planned with those DLC chapters in a different way, because it's clear that the work that went into everything meant a LOT to the team, and that they were DEEPLY impacted by not being able to do the full scope of what they were initially setting out for due to extenuating circumstances with the studio.

It's also gutting to lose Tabata, but I really hope that he manages to land somewhere that'll let him make full use of his talents in a more efficient and supportive environment. He's given me some of my favourite games, so I really hope that there's a studio or something out there that'll give him a place where he can grow and excel.

On the upside though, everything about Episode Ardyn looks like they're pouring their whole heart and soul into it, and Comrades still getting its standalone means that Tres and I can have an easier way to get more people to dive in and bash the new bosses.




X

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Trailers are finally uploaded:

X

 

[cold_spirit]

I’m indifferent towards the other episodes being cancelled. What bothers me is the announcement of Episode Ardyn Prologue. Seriously, what is with SE’s obsession with fracturing their stories? What could possibly be so important and so unworkable into the DLC that it needed to be broken off into its own anime? My tolerance for their self-induced convolution is far past its breaking point.

 

[Blade]

I think this deserves its own thread, I'll go make one.

Where the heck is said thread????

Though, if I'm being honest, I'm glad the horse finally died if you catch my meaning, they were beating it pretty hard.

I think Square Enix has to re-evaluate their business after the advent and exit of Tabata.

 

[Tashasaurous]

Tabata quitting, other three DLC cancelled, and 33 million loss of money...I didn't see this coming. Seriously...Ouch. Just hope KH3 will at least help a little with this huge money problem the company has right now...they'll be needing it if they want to begin on FFXVI.

 

[Lulcielid]

While the situation is not ideal it is also a far cry from a gloomy doom train that some (justified) upset fans are jumping into.

Let's calm down for a moment and think of the situation.

While us getting less content than previously promised is not the ideal ending, it's also hardly the worst thing.

We need to put a bit of perspective, we are coming to a close of the SECOND year of DLC for the game, we have had plenty of content in those 730 days with a bit more content for the beginning of the THIRD year to come. How many single-player AAA or similar production value game get that much time of support? Isn't that more than enough?

What I'm trying to say is this is NOT a situation where the game had a short life of content cut even shorter (4 DLCs, many collaborations, many QoL updates, timed quests, an expanded last dungeon, PC release, mod support, extra Multiplayer support, new gameplay mechaniques with Armiger, playable Chocobros in main game and more, a farcry from short content), this is just a game with a long life of content not being stretched far longer than it needed.

I'm not saying don't be upset with the third year being cut short but don't go saying all this is a failure as we're still getting that third year of content and what's left of this year.

What we are still getting before support wraps up:

1. Collaboration with FF14
2. Standalone Multiplayer + its new content
3. Ardyn DLC
4. The other 3 stories from the cancelled DLCs in some form.

And above all else, we're still getting a freaking THIRD year of content, a short third year but a third year nonetheless.

The end is not as gloomy as parotted. The end is not as ideal as we would have liked. The end is just serviceable.

Final Fantasy XV has had a good run since its release and was journey packed with content and that is all that matters. And the recent news won't take that away from me.

 

[Blade]

For those who wanted Aranea, friendly reminder you can get still her outfit/appearance in COMRADES.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

I couldn't agree more thoroughly with @Lulcielid on this. It's disheartening that all of the cancellations happened, but it's FAR from the worst thing ever, and the content they are still releasing looks excellent.

@Blade – I'd be willing to bet that the Ardyn prologue is them reaching out to an animation studio (likely the one that did Brotherhood), to see if they might be able to make use of animation in order to wrap up the story that they were going to tell with the DLC episodes but are no longer able to. If anything, I'm stoked that this is happening, because it means that Brotherhood and the other anime tie-in stories could potentially have a collection if that does end up being the route that they take with it, since it's not officially announced that that's what they're doing, but it just seems circumstantially likely.




X

 

[lithiumkatana17]

Blegh. This wasn't the news I was expecting to wake up to this morning.

That being said, the new Comrades update looks excellent. Fighting Gilgamesh with my Glaive, hell yeah. Maybe that's what I need to get me invested. I believe I heard something somewhere about Comrades being spun into it's own game?

Episode Ardyn? Meh. Those who know me know that I don't really care for all the Ardyn sympathy. Great character, to be sure, but I'm just not invested emotionally in him the way some others are. And an anime prologue to his DLC, whaaaaaaaaaat.

I can see the rest of the DLC content--primarily Luna and Aranea's episodes--being spun into novellas. That's something I'd invest in.

 

[Kuja9001]

Honestly, I feel bad for Tabata, XV and Type-0 weren't no where near my favs, I feel bad for how he just up and slid on outta SE after dropping his hopes and positivity for XV.

 

[Tashasaurous]

Even though the cancellation of three of the four promised DLC is disappointing, that's not an issue at all. It's the fact that I'm concerned on what caused Tabata to suddenly decide to resign and the fact that Square Enix has suffered a huge loss of a large amount of money, and making games is very expensive. They seriously gonna need to do something to avoid in losing more, otherwise there'll be a mass job losses and that is never a good thing...for anyone.

Not just for the Company in general, but for those who worked there and for their families.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I'm no business prodigy by any stretch of imagination, but I kind of feel like the $33 million "loss" thing is kind of misleading. It's not so much a loss as a lack of return thus far on an investment that was only made about seven months ago.

Maybe these days panic sets in for shareholders if two fiscal quarters go by with no revenue to speak of (much less any actual profit), but surely they must have understood that this is what they would be looking at. For that matter, surely the startup costs (office space, computers, programs, etc.) for a new studio aimed at developing AAA titles aren't indicative of what operational costs will look like after a year?

And make no mistake: Luminous Productions was established for the express purpose of "developing new AAA titles, and bringing innovative games and other entertainment content to a global audience" (this is a direct quote). Yet the reason they've given for the posted "losses" is a decision to focus on "large-scale, high-quality AAA game titles."

What to make of that? The studio's explicit purpose for existing is why it posted losses in its first two fiscal quarters? And given what that purpose is, that's somehow a problem? Was anyone actually expecting AAA titles to be churned out like mobile platform stuff?

My guess is that some shareholders panicked and bitched; Tabata was told to get all hands on deck with Luminous's new AAA IP (i.e. cancel the small stuff related to FFXV); he probably got pissed and fought for keeping as much of the DLC as possible (maybe with his staff backing him up); they secured "Episode Ardyn" since it's the most important of the planned DLCs (and since work had already been done on it), along with a few other things mostly done; Tabata became disillusioned with the whole process since this is how he was being jerked around in his first year in his role as head of Luminous; and then Tabata quit.

In other words, more of Square Enix's classic song and dance of not getting their left hand and right hand on the same page, so they end up wiping their ass with the hand not holding the paper.

 

[lithiumkatana17]

Episode Ardyn probably didn't get the ax because they were too far along on it... would've been a bigger waste of money to not release it. Wasn't it supposed to be the first of the DLCs planned to be released anyway?

 

[Ryuman]

I seems more likely that Tabata left because he wasn't interested in the future of Luminous or perhaps the kind of games it was going to make.
He was apparently given options for how the studio would continue, I'll post the quote here:
"Eurogamer understands that Tabata was presented with the option to have Luminous Productions turn into one of Square Enix's regular business divisions, a course it now seems set on, or spin it off as his own company with Square Enix investment, though he chose to leave altogether. The departure was confirmed internally towards the end of this summer."

Multiple sources indicate that he left prior to the cancellation of the DLC's (The cancellations accounting for the 33 million loss, which wasn't reported in any kind of panic, but rather because it's information they are bound to share as a business). Tabata always seemed like the driving force of the multimedia aspect of XV and with him gone Square must've felt that delivering 3 other single-player DLC's, 2 years after release, was not a profitable enough venture to complete and took a strategic loss.

I don't think there's much need in theorising a more unpleasant scenario here. I'm not saying there's no way Tabata was unhappy with SE culture but ultimately he seemed to leave to try his hand at something different.

 

[Lulcielid]

Another whisper I'm hearing that influenced his departure was his new IP being under the treat of becoming another FF game.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1060500467183247360

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

@Ryuman

I'm not convinced that there was no panic or shenanigans, nor that the cancellation of the DLCs is supposed to account for this "extraordinary loss" (SE's own words for it), nor that Tabata chose to leave his fans hanging and the DLCs were canceled as a result.

For one thing, again, the official reason given in SE's statement is that the loss resulted from their decision "to focus the Subsidiary’s development efforts on large-scale, high-quality AAA game titles." That's their own explanation, not something being read into it by upset fans.

For another thing, only a month prior to his resignation, Tabata was talking about how excited he was to be doing the alternate timeline DLC, and saying things like "we want to build something new with the users" and "It's a huge responsibility to provide a game to a user. That responsibility, that burden that I have to deliver toward my fans, is even more extreme now than it was before."

The man was even talking about the possibility of future endeavors with FFXV that may include LARPing!

I can't fathom that he just up and lost all that excitement and sense of responsibility toward his fans that could have been resolved with a few more months at SE. It just plain makes more sense that people above him were asking things of him he didn't agree with.

I could be wrong about Tabata, of course. However, he has earned and nurtured the capital to bank on with me that the company at large sometimes doesn't.

 

[ultima espio]

I'm hoping they manage to tell them in animes like brotherhood. It'll have all been written by now I guess, shame to waste it.

Ray Chase and Robbie Daymond reacted on twitter:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1060541975114395648

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1060614978300870656

 

[Tashasaurous]

@Ryuman
I can't fathom that he just up and lost all that excitement and sense of responsibility toward his fans that could have been resolved with a few more months at SE. It just plain makes more sense that people above him were asking things of him he didn't agree with.

I could be wrong about Tabata, of course. However, he has earned and nurtured the capital to bank on with me that the company at large sometimes doesn't.

He did the similar thing twice before. Once he talked about remaking Before Crisis-Final Fantasy VII for 3DS and how excited he was....That never happened.

And then there's Final Fantasy Type Next he wanted to do along with Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3...Neither of those happened either.

Maybe he does lose excitement and interest rather quickly and changed his mind about this but never said anything and it's only now that he decided to call it quits and start up something of his own ideas that won't turn into Final Fantasy, or something like that.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

He could only do with SE's money what they gave him permission to do.

 

[Ryuman]

@The Twilight Mexican
I would find it unusual to think there was no disagreement either. It was clearly due to what Square wanted to do with the studio. I'm quite partial to the idea that they wanted another FF project out of Luminous. But they gave him options, even if he didn't take them. Tabata strikes me as a very independent and driven person, interested in working on his things, his way. He's done well for himself and, as pointed out in the other thread, he has already received multiple offers from places. Despite the secure number of avenues, he still desires to start his own, wholly independent studio.

Eurogamer's statement isn't doesn't completely narrow down the date the departure was confirmed, but 'toward the end of summer' isn't all that far off from the Polygon feature you posted. I'm not so sure Tabata initially anticipated the cancellation of the DLC as a result of his resignation. He'd basically left most of that work to others on the team anyway. Well, it happened all the same, I guess. I'm fine the the general timeline of events different journalists have kind of put together.

I wouldn't look too deep into Square's wording for the losses either, as I assume 'Extraordinary Loss' just refers to the general business term accounting for irregular losses cause by atypical events. Could be wrong, though.

Either way, there's definitely not the kind of animosity in the air that you might expect from this kind of event. Not to me anyway. I guess different networks would try to frame it that way though. I think everyone will move on well enough and I'm sure Tabata will continue to find success.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Are they socialist comrades?

 

[Blade]

I found a thing.

Spoiler