One of the more interesting facets of interviewing various members of Creative Business Unit III, the studio behind the development of Final Fantasy XVI, during this cover story trip, was hearing about the differences between developing an MMO in Final Fantasy XIV and a new single-player Final Fantasy. With the former, CBUIII gets to create settings and characters they can easily return to in future patch quests, expansions, and more. But theoretically, that’s not the case with the latter – Clive Rosfield’s story wraps up in Final Fantasy XVI.
And right now, that indeed could be the end of Clive and the rest of Valisthea’s story because currently, CBUIII has no plans for FFXVI DLC, according to director Hiroshi Takai. He and producer Naoki Yoshida say the team’s priority is getting the game into players’ hands to see what they think.
“It’s a one-off game,” Yoshida tells me. “We’re asking players to pay the full price for this experience, and so we want an experience that’s going to equal the amount of money that players are going to be paying and we want them to have satisfaction equal to what they paid or even more than that.
He, Takai, and the rest of CBUIII I speak to reiterate they created Valisthea to be vast, and it’s a world the team would like to return to. I get the sense if the demand is there, CBUIII is ready on a moment’s notice to return, perhaps through DLC or, harkening back to its MMO expertise, an expansion. At this point, considering recent entries like Final Fantasy XV and Final Fantasy VII Remake did receive DLC, it’d be unusual to see FFXVI not receive any.
“We have no idea if people are going to fall in love with Valisthea and fall in love with Clive’s story and want to see more of the world and more of its characters,” Yoshida says. “So while we always want to consider DLC or spinoffs or those types of things where you can learn more about the game, first we want to see if Valisthea and Clive are really things players around the world want to see more of and then make that decision.”
On a similar note, Takai says there aren’t any plans for non-game tie-ins a la FFXV’s Kingsglaive to supplement the world of FFXVI for the time being.
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