Final Fantasy XV free updates road map: new characters and bosses planned

Imprompto

As a thanks for supporting the game, Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata said the team will keep their promise of continuing to support the game after launch and thus have strengthened the update road-map “considerably beyond what we originally planned.” Six pieces of DLC are already planned: Holiday Pack, Booster Pack, Episode Ignis, Episode Prompto, Episode Gladiolus, and Online Expansion Pack: War Buddy. Tabata details what free updates to expect beyond these.

In the “short term,” Tabata says they plan to improve the “gameplay satisfaction” of Chapter 13 and will release more information later. Their “mid term” goals are to improve presentation in the second half of the game including the story. More specifically, they want to flesh out the character Ravus more, but this will take some time as they have to record voice-work in multiple languages.

Making more of the story characters playable is the one concrete “long-term” goal, while Tabata also mentions they are considering implementing an avatar system to create a custom player. They will also continue to think of new ideas and updates they can add to improve the game as time goes on.

Not listed under any arbitrary time frame but planned nonetheless are new game plus, larger text, items that allow for low-level runs and invincibility (aka god mode), limited-time hunts (elusive targets, anyone?) and optional bosses. Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda is one such boss, the only one confirmed at this time. Final Fantasy XIII-2 (which is an absolutely fantastic game might I add) also had a lot of bosses added as DLC to it’s Coliseum, which was empty and had little to do there in the base game alone. 

As much as I love FFXIII-2, this much was unforgivable. Similar to the Coliseum in its DLC exclusivity was Serendipity, a casino city similar to FF7’s Golden Saucer. This area had more than nothing (like the Coliseum), but still very little to do there unless you downloaded the Sazh DLC. Also, despite having an outfit option in the menu, all alternative costumes were paid DLC. I have a habit of playing games long after release and once all the post-launch patches, updates and DLC are all out, so I went in with all of that already installed. Thus I got to enjoy the full vision of what they had in store for the game, but I imagine people who played at release were not too pleased. I loved it but I don’t know if I would have replayed from the start to enjoy the extra content after it came out.

If those three elements of the game weren’t useless without DLC and had a fair amount of content in them in the base game, no one would have said anything. It is quite difficult to judge what is acceptable DLC and what should have been in the base game in a lot of cases, but it was not so gray with FFXIII-2 despite my adoration.

The major difference between these two cases right now is that FFXIII-2‘s extra content was paid, while these new updates (not including the six DLC packs) for FFXV will be free. I have yet to begin FFXV, so you tell me: do these additions seems like things that should’ve been there to begin with? Would you have accepted waiting several more months or even a year to have it all at launch? 

Announcing Free Updates for Final Fantasy XV [Square Enix]