Final Fantasy XV’s developers say they were “genuinely surprised” at the negative feedback to the game. In an interview with us at Gamescom, the game’s director, Hajime Tabata says “it really wasn’t predicted we’d get that kind of response.”
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Tabata implies that the response to the game’s launch was mixed, saying “just after the release of the game obviously there were a number of people who really did like the game, but there were a number of other people as well who perhaps weren’t as satisfied and weren’t as keen on the game.” He cites the latter stages of the game as particularly unpopular, and says that as a result of players’ dissatisfaction “we really felt we wanted to go back and continue developing and improving the game to satisfy as many people as possible.”
A DLC schedule had already been planned out for the game for the next year or so, but rather than pushing ahead with more new content, “we decided we were going to go back and really polish and tweak the main game and improve the quality of that.”
Tabata seems genuinely disappointed at the response, and goes on to say that “we wanted the game to be as good as possible, we really put our all into making it at that time.”
“Obviously, we were kind of surprised that a lot of the negative opinions were really focused around the second half of the game and what happened with that. I think if we were to have predicted that and knew that it was going to happen we probably would have dealt with things very differently afterwards. But no, it was a genuine surprise.”