A lot of people have been mentioning and making it sound like "Oh, Nomura's taking too much time, and it hurts"
He revealed to Gamespot that the decision for the game to move development from the Luminous Engine, on which Final Fantasy XV was developed, to Unreal Engine 4 was made by executives at Square Enix above his level. This occured about a year into development on the game, and caused extensive delays:
There was a decision made to change to an external [engine]...Unreal Engine 4, he said.
So we switched over to that. Unfortunately there was a bit of time that needed to be rewinded and started over. So there was a bit of a setback there, but it was a decision that the company had to make, so it was inevitable.
Completely understandable to be hurt when you're accused of being the main "culprit" of something which wasn't in your ability to influence, yet the only advice one may give there is to ignore those whiners. They're there since 2006 more or less anyways.
How many of those more "grounded" fans have said this from the very beginning? Now we have official confirmation on it but I doubt it will actually have much influence on that particular part of the fandom.
Nomura also revealed that the promotional plan for Kingdom Hearts 3 should reveal each world before the game launches in 2018. He said that games can add conent via DLC after the games release, so there is no need to hide any of the new worlds.
Gamespot asked about any potential plans for DLC:
Nothing is set in stone, and I'm afraid we can't go into details, but I have told the team: Just be prepared to be able to accommodate for something like that; Nomura said.
We can't suddenly develop a system where we're accommodating for downloadable content. So it's not confirming or denying either way, but just so that the development team will be prepared, I have informed them of making the preparations.
In all honesty he can reveal every single world just fine if he cuts down on the story spoilers in return, would be a neat payoff.
As for the whole DLC-business. Nowadays having at least
some additional stuff delivered later is almost a default of the gaming industry and I have actually no problem with some extra Coliseum Cups, Super Bosses or clothing/Keyblade DLCs.
Story DLC would really depend on what exactly it is as the main story should certainly be
complete with the vanilla launch and definitely NOT something like FF XIII-2 had.
Thats very optimistic. I'd say you're looking at 15 worlds total like KH2 at most with his comments. I'd say 8-10 Disney worlds is the realistic amount with 10 being on the high end.
15 worlds with these massive areas is already much more than KH 1 and KH 2 had when looking at it overall.
The actual number of worlds is not really an indicator if each single KH III world is two or three times as big as one of the old worlds was.
Depending on how many original worlds are included, we may end up on around 16 or 17 worlds overall, but that is a generous estimate.
I don't see there being that many original worlds though. Radiant Garden, Twilight Town, The Keyblade Graveyard, and Daybreak Town.
Out of these, I'm even not entirely sure about Daybreak Town being actually playable when there are locations that make more sense narrative- and timeline-wise (Daybreak Town is a relic of the past after all) like i.e. Castle Oblivion/LoD.
Twilight Town we already know to be present while Radiant Garden as the Capital of Light and the main home of over 90% of the FF cameos is almost a no-brainer while the Graveyard might be the site of the series of final battles.
If we still want to include Daybreak it would be five originals if we insinuate that Yen Sid's Tower is again attached to Twilight Town.
1. Daybreak, 2. Graveyard, 3. Radiant Garden, 4. Twilight Town, 5. CO/LoD.
Yet in DDD, it was stated in the Ultimania that the World that never was has special properties which allows all 13 Xehanorts to gather in one place, so this may catapult this world back into the circle of possible playable originals as well.
But even with six originals there are still nine slots left for Disney-worlds if one wants to reach a number of 15.
What's with the DLC hate? As long as the game is complete and it's nothing necessary, why hope there won't be DLC? It's a good way to add content to those who really love the game and would like to pay, and for those who don't, they can just say "no, thanks, I don't need this."
So… why do you hope there's no DLC? Genuine question.
;(
It may be because examples of incompleteness and DLC-"fixing" already exist especially from Square, read: FF XIII-2 and FF XV to quite an extent.
For some people, those already constitute as a negative precedence cases which outshine the admittedly positive examples like i.e. World of Final Fantasy.
On one hand I am supportive of Nomura actually addressing this issue, yet on the other I doubt that it will do much to change the minds of the KH 3-whiners in regards to their scapegoat.
