[04/06] Stella no longer in FFXV; key Versus XIII scenes axed; Duscae demo patch coming on the 9th
Anyone still clinging onto those loose Shakespearean overtones from the Versus XIII days should probably let them go for good now. In today's Active Time Report, game director Hajime Tabata finally came out transparent about the aspects of the old Versus XIII that will no longer appear in Final Fantasy XV. The biggest casualty of this great purge is Stella Nox Fleuret, the rapier-wielding opposite to Noctis.
As explained by Tabata, "We wanted to keep her as a heroine in FFXV’s story, and pursued ways to tie her in to FFXV’s design as well, but we found it increasingly difficult to make sense of Stella’s character and role within FFXV. So then we thought, do we want to recreate Stella with a different role and image, or do we want to start over with a new hreoine? And after a lot of consideration, we decided not to include Stella in FFXV. Instead, we have a new heroine named Luna, who has a different role within the story. So we will be talking more about her in the future.”
Other casualties include the old party scene in the city of Insomnia. First seen in CGI form many moons ago, it depicted Noctis meeting with the Tenebrean princess by the foot of a large painting of the goddess Etro, with the two characters discussing the implications of seeing the "Light". A later rendition of the scene from 2011 shows Niflheim soldiers invading the city and the building. That scene is gone and will not appear in any similar shape or form in FFXV.
“Scenes like those had to be regressed because of a very critical factor. So now, the sequence is: Noct and his retinue leave Insomnia, and then… What was it? Then the Niflheim army attacks the crown city. There’s an extremely important reason behind this decision. In fact, it could be construed a spoiler, so I can’t tell you about it here.
“The third point is not a change. But as I just informed you, we decided to delete the scene of a party in Insomnia, which is a city like Shinjuku. So then we became concerned that the players who were looking forward to some gameplay in that city might worry that they would be losing that gameplay as well. So I thought I should let you know here and now that we are preparing situations that would involve gameplay in the Shinjuku-like city of Insomnia. We had previously released information on Versus saying you would begin combat right after the Niflheim army attacks the city, but the new gameplay would not fall in around the same timeline. As for when and in what kind of situation the combat occurs, we would like for you to wait for future updates, and play the actual game, but we are working on something great, so I hope you will look forward to it.”
That is not to say they are wildly straying from the original vision of scenario writer Kazushige Nojima.
“Quite some time has passed now… After we had switched from Versus to XV, the first decision we made was to make sure that FFXV would have a complete, coherent story in one game. That was an important decision—one made at the company level, too. So I started thinking about how we could get a full, coherent story in a single game. And the crux of that was which elements from Versus we could carry over and which would not fit into the new structure as XV.
“So I went through everything in detail, seeing which areas we would have to change. By that time, a fair amount of information about the Versus story had already been released, so we tried to keep as many elements from it as we could. We tried hard in a number of areas. But it would have been very difficult to carry over absolutely everything as it was. We considered what was possible with the new-gen hardware, as well as what elements absolutely must be included in XV but might fall through if not given top priority. It was not easy to nail down what was essential for the story to be contained in one title. Everyone involved was very sensitive in dealing with this, and we patiently debated numerous times, but we still couldn’t come up with a definitive answer.
“In the end, we decided to be as faithful as possible to Mr. Nojima’s story for Versus and focus on realizing the original story as much as we could. It goes without saying that I consulted with him on this. And he said that if I valued his original story, then it would still fulfill his vision, even if not every single element he came up with included in the end. So that gave us the confidence to set our goal, which was to create a narrative that utilizes Mr. Nojima’s original story as fully as possible.”
Characters who have survived the purge include the raven-haired woman we only partially see a glimpse of in the 2013 re-reveal trailer, and the blonde female dragoon from 2011's Advent Children Blu-ray special trailer.
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In addition to the above, players will be able to gain access to a patched version of the Episode Duscae demo this month on the 9th at 8AM PDT/11AM EDT. This will be a free download available for demo holders, so anyone who has not acquired Duscae since March will be out of luck.
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The game will not have a trailer at E3. Expect it at Gamescom in August.
In the meantime, here's a Game of Thrones-ey concept art of young Noctis and presumably King Regis. Winter is coming?
Nova Crystallis 1 | 2
Anyone still clinging onto those loose Shakespearean overtones from the Versus XIII days should probably let them go for good now. In today's Active Time Report, game director Hajime Tabata finally came out transparent about the aspects of the old Versus XIII that will no longer appear in Final Fantasy XV. The biggest casualty of this great purge is Stella Nox Fleuret, the rapier-wielding opposite to Noctis.
As explained by Tabata, "We wanted to keep her as a heroine in FFXV’s story, and pursued ways to tie her in to FFXV’s design as well, but we found it increasingly difficult to make sense of Stella’s character and role within FFXV. So then we thought, do we want to recreate Stella with a different role and image, or do we want to start over with a new hreoine? And after a lot of consideration, we decided not to include Stella in FFXV. Instead, we have a new heroine named Luna, who has a different role within the story. So we will be talking more about her in the future.”
Other casualties include the old party scene in the city of Insomnia. First seen in CGI form many moons ago, it depicted Noctis meeting with the Tenebrean princess by the foot of a large painting of the goddess Etro, with the two characters discussing the implications of seeing the "Light". A later rendition of the scene from 2011 shows Niflheim soldiers invading the city and the building. That scene is gone and will not appear in any similar shape or form in FFXV.
“Scenes like those had to be regressed because of a very critical factor. So now, the sequence is: Noct and his retinue leave Insomnia, and then… What was it? Then the Niflheim army attacks the crown city. There’s an extremely important reason behind this decision. In fact, it could be construed a spoiler, so I can’t tell you about it here.
“The third point is not a change. But as I just informed you, we decided to delete the scene of a party in Insomnia, which is a city like Shinjuku. So then we became concerned that the players who were looking forward to some gameplay in that city might worry that they would be losing that gameplay as well. So I thought I should let you know here and now that we are preparing situations that would involve gameplay in the Shinjuku-like city of Insomnia. We had previously released information on Versus saying you would begin combat right after the Niflheim army attacks the city, but the new gameplay would not fall in around the same timeline. As for when and in what kind of situation the combat occurs, we would like for you to wait for future updates, and play the actual game, but we are working on something great, so I hope you will look forward to it.”
“Quite some time has passed now… After we had switched from Versus to XV, the first decision we made was to make sure that FFXV would have a complete, coherent story in one game. That was an important decision—one made at the company level, too. So I started thinking about how we could get a full, coherent story in a single game. And the crux of that was which elements from Versus we could carry over and which would not fit into the new structure as XV.
“So I went through everything in detail, seeing which areas we would have to change. By that time, a fair amount of information about the Versus story had already been released, so we tried to keep as many elements from it as we could. We tried hard in a number of areas. But it would have been very difficult to carry over absolutely everything as it was. We considered what was possible with the new-gen hardware, as well as what elements absolutely must be included in XV but might fall through if not given top priority. It was not easy to nail down what was essential for the story to be contained in one title. Everyone involved was very sensitive in dealing with this, and we patiently debated numerous times, but we still couldn’t come up with a definitive answer.
“In the end, we decided to be as faithful as possible to Mr. Nojima’s story for Versus and focus on realizing the original story as much as we could. It goes without saying that I consulted with him on this. And he said that if I valued his original story, then it would still fulfill his vision, even if not every single element he came up with included in the end. So that gave us the confidence to set our goal, which was to create a narrative that utilizes Mr. Nojima’s original story as fully as possible.”
Characters who have survived the purge include the raven-haired woman we only partially see a glimpse of in the 2013 re-reveal trailer, and the blonde female dragoon from 2011's Advent Children Blu-ray special trailer.
--------------
In addition to the above, players will be able to gain access to a patched version of the Episode Duscae demo this month on the 9th at 8AM PDT/11AM EDT. This will be a free download available for demo holders, so anyone who has not acquired Duscae since March will be out of luck.
--------------
The game will not have a trailer at E3. Expect it at Gamescom in August.
In the meantime, here's a Game of Thrones-ey concept art of young Noctis and presumably King Regis. Winter is coming?
Nova Crystallis 1 | 2
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