Final Fantasy XV: 9 Big Changes You Need To Know About

1. The Open-World Design

Several of the Final Fantasy games, despite their huge, 100-odd hour length if you do everything, are quite linear throughout, with players travelling from town to town or dungeon to dungeon in a pre-ordained fashion until the game opens up in the latter half As linearity has increasingly become a dirty word in the gaming industry, XV is opting to do away with some of this linearity by adopting an almost seamless, interconnected open world for you to explore. That's not to say there won't be loading times (there will be when you enter a city etc) but there are large areas - such as those in Episode Duscae - which can be roamed around, explored and wandered around in to your heart's content. Think of it almost like an evolution of the world map; XV's sections are huge and sprawling, with travel possible around these areas using your car or a train. There's also a built-in dynamic weather and day/night system with changes to the world as appropriate, quests almost everywhere on the map (in the vein of Skyrim or Dragon Age Inquisition) and your characters will even have a chat to each other as things happen in real time. It's not entirely open ended of course, with a plot still flowing through its veins. It looks like they're going about it in the right way though; FFXIII was criticised heavily for its linear story-centric approach, so opening up XV should satisfy all those critical people. What have you found to be the biggest change so far with FF XV, and is it good or bad? Let us know in the comments!