Toriyama: Next Final Fantasy will be more open than FFXIII

Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama has said that the next story-driven entry in the franchise will be more open than XIII, the linearity of which has invited flak from some quarters.

Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama has said that the next story-driven entry in the franchise will be more open than XIII, the linearity of which has invited flak from some quarters.

Toriyama chalked up FFXIII‘s lack of familiar JRPG elements like explorable towns to his strengths in making story-driven games as well as the difficulties in developing for HD consoles:

Personally, the Final Fantasys that I have worked on have been very story-driven, so in terms of the development I wanted to, of course, use my personal strengths which where those.

 

In the Final Fantasys on previous non-high definition consoles, we were able to kind of take everyone’s ideas and include them in the games

 

I call it a bento box system, where you have all of the different little things in there. So we had minigames or towns were you were able to talk to all of the townspeople. But with the HD console you’re not really able to do that because it takes so long to develop.

 

We had to consider the amount of time it took to create the game engine, which we built from scratch, as well, and so with that additional time included we had to decide what we could and couldn’t do.

Now that the technology is there, though, these familiar elements might show up again in the franchise’s next main entry. If not, hey, they can always just release it as DLC.

The next time you see a Final Fantasy, we might be able to pack in more of those elements that existed in the past. And I also think that a game doesn’t need to have all of those items in the future. We can create additional downloadable content for people to add, too. It doesn’t have to come with that game itself.

Via [Gamasutra]