Speaking with Japanese magazine Famitsu, Producer Naoki Yoshida confirmed that the game’s release date will be announced before the end of 2022. He also commented on the challenges of working on a traditional game with a retail release, saying that he had to get used to the new environment quickly. I’m curious about the release date because it’s nearing completion. At the moment it’s set to be “Summer 2023”, but when do you think you’ll find out the specific release date? Yoshida : We plan to release the information again later this year, so I think we can say it at that time. I don’t think it’s going to be over the summer, so I think it’s okay (laughs). I’ve been used to the development environment for online games for the past few years, so I was a little surprised that I had to master it so quickly (bitter smile). If you think about producing physical discs, shipping them all over the world, and so on, it takes several months of physical time after mastering up. When I say that the development status is 90% and 50%, I think there will be voices saying “Please release it immediately”, but there are such circumstances… In the same interview, Final Fantasy XVI Director Hiroshi Katai talked about the current development status of the game, saying that development is 95% complete. The team is playing through the game daily to make tweaks and improvements and fix bugs. Apparently, no one is allowed to add code at this stage due to potential bugs getting introduced by the changes. By the way, what is the current development status? Takai: About 95%. –It’s almost finished! Takai: That ’s right. The current situation is that we play through the game day by day, tweak the rough parts, and brush up the parts that have flaws in performance or drawing. The rest is bugfixing. Yoshida: Anyway, the scale of the game is large, so debugging takes a lot of time. Almost all programmers are fiddling with code to fix bugs. Takai: There is a notice that it is forbidden to add code because new bugs will appear (laughs). Final Fantasy XVI launches on PlayStation 4 during Summer 2023. We will keep you updated on the game as soon as more come in on it, so stay tuned for all the latest news.
