Now that I had a few days to sleep on the recent news, calm down, and objectively look at the situation - I can say that in all honestly I’m not that surprised, disappointed.. but not surprised.
The Royal Update was the end of XV, I remember even thinking it was too ambitious to do 4 full DLCs in one year from scratch (considering the original 3 episodes and comrades took 1-year and they were planned from the start with high likelyhood of some work already done by the time XV released, and that’s with a full dev team). The 6-month period of silence was another red flag, in hindsight I should’ve taken comments like “it’s amazing how a two year old single player RPG is still supported” as a concern.
The project was never coming together as intended; the delays, cancellations, scarpped concepts, re-branding, fatigued team, poor engine, un-realistic deadlines, angry community, and a director that despite having a good intention is unfortunately incapable of keeping his promises under check (as seen with so many areas, demos, story arcs, and cutscenes that were just scrapped) - it’s frankly amazing we have a game as it is at all.
Square Enix never had their shit together in the last decade. All of their projects were poor. The few success stories like FF14 Reboot and Nier Automata are 90% attributable to the unique individuals who made those games success stories, it’s the professional competence of the directors, not due to good guidance from SE. The corporate greed and complete disconnect with their fanbase led to unfinished products launching too early for a quick cash grab, support and post-launch features that were the opposite of what fans were asking for, and premature reveals of projects that will not be releasing within a decade.
At the end of the day what is XV? It’s not a success to SE since I suspect the statement about needing $10M in sales had some merit (they wouldn’t be cancelling stuff now if the game was making them the money they want), it’s a betrayal to the old FF fans that wanted a traditional turn based RPG, it’s a betrayal to XV fans since the story we wanted fixed never got addressed and was sacrificed in favour of pointless crossovers nobody liked, and in the end FFXV is even a betrayal towards itself - it’s not the VersusXIII from 2006 & it’s not the XV from 2013. In the end it’s a rushed mix of ideas that are never fully developed. The game has an identity crisis despite what anyone says. I tried to believe that enough patches and DLCs would fix it, but I realize now that the issues stem from the core - the vision of this game was never clear. No amount of DLCs, movies, anime, books, online novels, ultimanias, mobile games, or artbooks will fix that.
I suppose I can look at the benefits of this cancellation, the major ones being the prevention of further contradicting or unexplained plot threads, further disjointing the new content from the base story, and the avoidance of alternate timelines (when the main one is as messy as it is). I will ride out the XV train up until the end, I might as well at this point, but my interest has shifted to other companies that deliver games in a timely manner and in complete forms.
