It’s been a month since Diogo posted his impressions of his first hands-on experience of Square Enix’s game through footage that had no other purpose than to highlight the combat system and restricted movement in a dark dungeon. “If we’ve decided to showcase this level, it’s simply because we finished it first. Sorry, I wanted to present a brighter environment too,” Naoki Yoshida laughed during the Q&A.
Do your Valisthéa, we’re going
And to better illustrate the scale of the atmospheres on offer Final Fantasy XVI, Square Enix shared a two-minute video focusing on the environments. A savory moment, to say the least, after a handful of trailers still edited to showcase the great spectacle, storytelling, and combat, but rarely the rest of what constitutes an RPG. Well, open your eyes because here are the expanses of desert that you can see from the back of a chocobo, the charming shopping streets, the green forests with trees caressed by the wind, the lake regions, the inhospitable volcanic formations or the paths that meandering through a vast field of wheat, facing a realm protected by a mother crystal attempting to defy the skies.
Remember that Square Enix has abandoned the open-world structure in favor of a game divided into different more or less large regions. Naoki Yoshida has also revealed the world map menu (in 3D) with its various teleportation points, confirming that it will be possible to return at will to places already visited to complete quests or gain experience. As viewers could see live, teleporting from place to place on the world map wasn’t quite instantaneous like the PS5’s SSD sometimes allows, but fast travel didn’t last more than 3 seconds on the black screen.
Square Enix concluded its presentation by promising to return to the load in April, this time to focus on the RPG elements, particularly to respond to purists who fear that the action dimension takes too much precedence over the rest . Note that due to technical issues, the video archive of this presentation will later be available on YouTube.
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