Final Fantasy FXN Network Content

Final Fantasy XV has not been announced yet, however there have seen several rumors and hints regarding the game.

Release Date

In an interview with Yoshinori Kitase at GamesCom, he mentions that the development time for FF XV will be significantly less than FF XIII due to the development staff's experience working on current generation consoles.

Action-RPG

Yoshinori Kitase has hinted to Edge in a interview that the next Final Fantasy game could be an action RPG instead of being turn-based.

"I think the nature of the franchise is to present something new each time. In the global market we see many players moving away from games that used turn-based systems toward what you might term an action-RPG.

That's a trend, and you ignore things like that at your peril."

-Yoshinori Kitase

Kitase went on to say that changes introduced in Final Fantasy XIII showed that the series was moving forward with each iteration - but left the door wide open for more substantial changes to be made in the next full game in the series.

"FFXIII and FFXIII-2's battle systems have those elements of speed and action that are the key words for us, though that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to stick to the same route in our next game. That's something only time can tell."

-Yoshinori Kitase

Luminous

"Luminous" is Square-Enix's next generation engine. Yoshihisa Hashimoto is the producer and technical director on the project and is joined by the project's lead programmer, Hiroshi Iwasaki.

The goal of Luminous is to create "a game engine that can truly take on the world head on." The engine will incorporate all the old Eidos technology.

Luminous will be a general purpose game development environment for achieving both high efficiency and high quality of the following:

• Visual Editing
  
• Live Editing
  
• Concurrent Editing
  
• Automatic Build and Automatic Test
  
• Online Friendly
  
• Asset Management Functionality
  
• Advanced Rendering
  
• Task Management
  
• Simple
  
• Cross Platform
  
• General Purpose
  
• Modularity
  
• Scalability

We can expect a followup report within two years.

Source: Luminous Engine

Given the time frame when next generation will start and the fact that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is the focus for the last half of 2011 and Final Fantasy Versus XIII will be the focus of 2012, Final Fantasy XV could very well be a next generation game that could possibly use the Luminous engine. Unless there is another big team at Square-Enix that we don't know about that is currently working on the title, they would probably end up using Crystal Tools instead. This is not official and nothing has been announced. This is simply speculation.

Source: Edge

Director Speculation

The way Square-Enix chooses the next Final Fantasy director is who ever presents the best idea. While that is hard to figure out, the following names have popped up.

Hiroshi Minagawa

Hiroshi Minagawa was recently interviewed by Eurogamer and this is what he said.

So can we expect Square Enix to embark on similar projects in the future? "If I have a chance, I'd like to remake Vagrant Story and other games," says Minagawa.

"But when I chose to remake Tactics Ogre it was after FFXII, which was a big project. I wanted to do something on a much smaller scale, and a smaller team, which is why I chose to do this. Probably after this, I'll do something bigger, like an original game. After that, I'll probably change my mind and return to something smaller."

Final Fantasy XV next, then? "I'm not saying anything," laughs Minagawa. Oh well.

FFXII was a big project, then he did Tactics Ogre which was smaller and now he wants to do something bigger. FFXV would be considered big. However, this really doesn't hint at anything other then that something is possibly brewing behind the scenes about FFXV, or he simply can't say anything at all because the game simply does not exist. It could involve Minagawa or not involve him at all. It's hard to say. Right now though, Minagawa is working on FFXIV with Komoto.

Hiroyuki Ito

Ito has a impressive resume that suggests that he's qualified to work on a big numbered Final Fantasy title. A rumor is that he is currently working on 3-4 unannounced titles. As of November 17th, 2011. It was recently revealed that he is still employed at Square-Enix

Yasumi Matsuno

It's a name that has popped up. Something to ask though is, "Does the Final Fantasy XII team still exist?" Due to the HD era demanding a staff increase of more specialized people within each department, the FFXII team has most likely split up to help aid the FFXIII, Versus XIII, and several other teams.

Unfortunately, this looks to be unlikely since Matsuno is now reportedly employed at Level-5. Link