FINAL FANTASY XV COULD USHER IN A NEW ERA FOR THE GAME DEMO

FINAL FANTASY XV COULD USHER IN A NEW ERA FOR THE GAME DEMO

I’M NOT SURE yet if it’s a good idea or a crummy one, but Square Enix’s deceptively prosaic decision to release multiple iterations of its demo version of Final Fantasy XV: Episode Duscae strikes me as more than feedback-focused fan service. It’s also a hopping-off-the-bandwagon maneuver.

The Final Fantasy publisher just announced it will unleash a second version of its demo for the long-in-development RPG in June. Demo version 1.0 arrived in March as a downloadable bonus bundled with Final Fantasy Type-0 HD. I liked it a trifle more than Game|Life editor Chris Kohler, although I also balked at the lame boys-club bits. (I’m no prude, I just draw my lines somewhere between respectfully sexy andsexploitatively absurd.)

It’s not often that a publisher updates a demo. It’s not often that a publisher even releases a demo, these days. They’re like this weird conceptual echo from the 1990s, when PC gamers still expected refunds if they hated a game but were getting the stink eye from piracy-paranoid retailers. Demos were supposed to be a way to peek under the hood, an insurance policy to mitigate player-author creative differences.

These days, how do we sample games before they hit? Usually, not at all. When we do, it’s in the form of “early betas,” or, more and more, “pre-alphas” (public-relations-speak for “Don’t sue us if the final game looksnothing like the prerelease sizzle reel“). Lately we’re seeing a lot of multiplayer previews on consoles, usually done as a stress test before servers go live, and which are usually deleted after a few week. And of course there’s Steam Early Access, in which you pay for games in full before they’re finished.

But demos employed as feedback funnels, months and maybe even years before the final game’s released? Demos with rejiggered followup versions? That’s new, or at least unusual for a publisher like Square Enix. (Though so are hour-and-a-half feedback videos with exhaustive poll breakouts that cover aspects of the demo even I wasn’t thinking about.)

It’s almost a counter-cultural thing. With betas or pre-alphas or whatever, you’ll see patches weekly, if not daily. The changes tend to be minute, the sort of fine-tuning and bug-quashing most players won’t notice. You have to stand pretty far back, time-wise, to quantify anything approaching a major shift.

Even Square Enix seems to know what it’s doing is a little… weird. “[From] a first-party perspective, there’s been no precedent of applying patches to demos,” said game director Hajime Tabata, responding to the game’s feedback.

I have no idea what’ll be new in version 2.0, but based on these developer interviews, I’m expecting major changes. Bug fixes of course, but also: better party A.I., difficulty tweaks, hide-and-fight tactical flow finessing, the option to cancel attacks by evading, wider (and smoother) camera angling, a rethink of the way lock-on targeting works, and probably at least a few yet-to-be-seen battle features.

In short, a pretty radical overhaul of the way the game’s fundamental differentiator—combat—works.

In theory, because of the scarcity of demo versions and the substantial timeframes between them, the approach serves a more independent creative team better. In an Early Access game or ongoing beta, change is constant and extremely granular, and one could argue that risks muddling the artistic vision. The tail in the latter case may be more likely to wag the dog (without the dog noticing).

I’m not saying that Tabata’s artistic vision is more likely to pass muster, because teams with bottomless money pools and ridiculously generous timeframes can still faceplant (and often do). But it’s an interesting little wrinkle in the long (and at times, worrisome) history of Final Fantasy XV‘s development.

I’m leery of the whole crowdsource-your-development thing, and thus cautiously optimistic about the alternative theory: Less-frequent, narrower audience peeks might veer closer to whatever a healthier balance between player and developer collaboration looks like.

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