"Oh, son. Apparently we really are making actual tangible progress with an end in sight."
Fresh from just announcing to fans on the Twitterverse that Moogles will indeed appear in Final Fantasy XV in a relatively light capacity, the official Twitter page for the game just disclosed something significant. It appears the game's development has passed the major milestone of the pre-beta phase after six months.
Development update! The pre-beta version of #FFXV is complete. For the past 6 months we have focused on crossing this line.
At [Tabata's] request PR and publicity has been relatively quiet recently to allow us to focus on finishing this stage of #FFXV development.
I'm no expert, but I believe the pre-beta stage is where all the critically important constituent elements of gameplay are finalised and implemented. To be finished with the pre-beta stage suggests that play-testing will soon be an imminent reality and that they have more or less nailed the salient foundations of gameplay that we may expect to see in the final product. Next up will presumably be whatever is lower down on the priorities agenda and the slow process of debugging and polishing up.
Going gold within 12 months might actually be the probable outcome, it seems. They have promised a 2016 release, after all...
Nova Crystallis