FINAL FANTASY XV
Uncovering a second, unfinished open world in Square Enix’s RPG
REMNANTS OF THIS WORLD ARE ODDLY EERIE, AND FASCINATING CURIOS.
06
As lovingly, lavishly presented as Final Fantasy XV’s world is, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the longawaited RPG is unfinished in some places – particularly in the second half of the game. Noctis’ tour with the lads is interrupted by a PS2-grade dreadful survival horror section, for example, but more pressingly there’s also a whole second area that can only be viewed from afar from inside a moving train…
A few crafty players have found a way around the latter problem, though, and have uncovered a whole undeveloped open world in FFXV. Thanks to player Fotm Hero, who escaped the world’s boundaries in the Cartanica mines area of the story using an unpatched version of the game, we’ve snagged a pretty comprehensive look at the kinds of environments the varied landscape contains. These areas are filled with low-resolution textures, train tracks that just stop in mid-air, and basic detail like trees and shrubs, but there’s also evidence that this place may once have been intended for more than just window dressing on Noctis’ train journey.
COLD MOUNTAINS
There’s a substantial-looking desert town near Cartanica Station filled with many complete-ish buildings and parked cars, for example. In Niflheim (the snowy mountain area which makes a fleeting appearance as players acquire Shiva in the story) there’s an icy landscape to tread – even a stretch of highway and a road suggesting you could drive around there. The setting of the second half of the game exists in an interconnected environment, basically – not all of what the later chapters show you loads in as Noctis wanders across the environment, but the foundations are there. Could it have once been intended as an explorable open world, like Lucis in the game’s opening chapters? Square Enix hasn’t commented on this at the time of writing…
It’s hard to believe that these areas were only ever meant as background detail. When you pull up the map in the second half of the game, you can see that you’re
essentially running along a straight line through a new area – so why do you even need a world map? It’s not like you can go off-piste. In the case of some locations, such as Niflheim, or the city of Tenebrae, some of your stops are so brief that you wonder why they’re even in the game to begin with. There’s a real problem with narrative context in these later chapters, and pacing them apart with exploration would no doubt have been welcomed by players. However, it also would’ve been really hard for the developers to pull off in time.
NO COUNTRY FOR YOUNG MEN
Realistically, finishing this part of the world to the same standard as Lucis would’ve added months or years onto the development time. Adding hunts, dungeons, side-quests and populated towns wouldn’t be a small job – not to mention finishing the environmental art – so it’d be a surprise if this whole area ever became explorable in the upcoming DLC chapters. It would be nice to see certain pockets reclaimed by the developers, though – even if it’s just a smaller slice of Niflheim to explore, or a more comprehensive version of Tenebrae. As it stands, this unfinished world is a fascinating curio, and oddly eerie in how barren it is.
At some point games have to be declared finished, and even with its flawed final hours, FFXV had more than its share of time in development hell. The world could perhaps feel more complete than it does, and the story could be less fragmented, but it’s the first time the series has shown signs of life compared to the modern standard of RPGs in about a decade. Final Fantasy is a contender again, with or without another continent to explore, and Square Enix has plenty of lessons it can learn about players’ expectations going into the VII Remake and the inevitable Final Fantasy XVI. We won’t mourn the continent that could’ve been, but we’re still hoping it’ll re-emerge in some form as the season pass content rolls around. Fancy some video tourism? Go to bit.ly/ FFlostworld to see the secret sights…