Final Fantasy XV was a hot topic during Gamescom last week, when director Hajime Tabata revealed a handful of new details, including the news that the game is on track to be released before 2017, implying that it will be released sometime in 2016.
When asked about the amount of work that’s been accomplished over the last year–when it was first revealed that Tabata was taking over the project that was originally helmed by Kingdom Hearts III director, Tetsuya Nomura–Tabata revealed that Final Fantasy XV will be the first main Final Fantasy game to be released simultaneously across all regions.
“This may be something that we are little bit embarrassed to talk about, but really, this is the first time that we’ve done a packaged, standalone Final Fantasy game with a simultaneous global launch, so we didn’t have the setup to deal with that, really. The first thing we had to do was rearrange our internal structure to create something that could do that. That was the first important work on the project.”
The last “main” Final Fantasy game, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, was released in Japan on Nov. 21, 2013. It took three more months for the game to reach other regions, in February 2014.
A full transcription of our interview with Tabata will be live later this week, with more new info on the upcoming RPG that was announced over nine years ago, at E3 2006.