Highlights
- Final Fantasy 16 intended to provide a complete and satisfying story without the need for DLC, but player feedback has prompted the development team to reconsider.
- The notion of a game director not prioritizing profit and instead focusing on delivering a quality experience seems surprising and possibly suspicious in the current gaming landscape.
- While DLC can sometimes be a shameless cash grab, it's unclear whether Final Fantasy 16's lack of DLC is a genuine effort to preserve the story and characters or simply a marketing strategy.
Final Fantasy Fan Fest 2023 has come and gone, and it's brought a lot of surprises along with it, from the announcement of Dawntrail, the next leg of the Final Fantasy 14 online saga, to good news for Xbox players, who will finally get their hands on the long-running MMO. But even with all the reveals and fanfare, and the still image of director/producer Naoki Yoshida (more commonly known as Yoshi-P) sleeping in his office that just wouldn't stop popping up on my Twitter feed no matter how many times I'd seen it, there's one thing Yoshida said a couple of weeks ago that's still bugging me.
The development team at Square Enix Creative put together this massively complex storytelling effort and then was prepared to just let it ... end? With no DLC? Did I hear that right? Let's check in with Yoshi-P himself.
"As you know, going into [Final Fantasy 16], the one thing we wanted to create [was] a full, complete story, something that you can enjoy from beginning to end 100% without any DLC, and I think we were able to do that," he was seen saying in a clip that made its rounds around the middle of last month. "But now we understand, we're getting feedback from players that have played the game and a lot of players want to see more, and we know that and understand that. For us, we're taking that and thinking about our options moving forward, so hopefully in the near future we can have something that we can give to you all."
Huh. A game director being genuinely surprised that fans finished his game and want more. Even more surprising, a game director not going into a project with the intent of milking his IP all the way to the bank (ah, how I loved mixed metaphors).
Nah, I don't buy it. Maybe I'm just old and jaded, but a major RPG going to market with no plans to keep dipping into the players' wallets sounds a little fishy to me.
I'll freely admit that I'm a little behind the curve when it comes to DLC. Hell, a couple of console generations ago, I didn't even have an internet service reliable enough to bother connecting my Xbox 360 to it (and if you ask our Multimedia editor, Chris, who has to wait about an hour every time I want to send him a 30-second clip, I still don't. Blame rural Ohio). So once I'd done all there was to do across the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 and was still craving more content, I did what any knuckle-dragging caveman would do: I walked into Gamestop and bought the Operation Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel, and Point Lookout DLC on disc. Yeah. That was a thing you could do back then, apparently. Of course, I never could get an expansion disc for Mothership Zeta without shelling out full price for whatever Fallout 3's special edition was called, so I still haven't played it, because I am a cheap bastard.
All that went down in 2008, and I know there's plenty more I had already missed out in the world of additional game content by that point, but that's just basic supply and demand. I can't be too upset when developers release an epilogue or entirely new story centered around a previously released game. I'll even enjoy the DLC I can't play.
Over the past few days, I've been reduced to watching playthroughs of FNAF Security Breach: Ruin since I own the base game on Xbox and the DLC is only on PC and PlayStation (damn you and your exclusivity, Jim Ryan!) And I won't even beat a dead horse armor over companies trying to make an extra buck or two-fifty because hey, if you don't want the paid DLC, don't pay for it. But a lot of the time, DLC is still a shameless cash grab, and we all know it.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on ol' Yoshi-P. Maybe his development team was being truly altruistic in trying to release an epic JRPG with a fully fleshed-out story that includes a definitive ending. Maybe the writers are so committed to that story and those characters, no matter how you may feel about them, that they want to see them preserved and protected, not distorted by what the howling masses would rather see happen. And maybe there are still AAA teams out there that care more about putting out true works of art than shilling themselves out for an extra buck.
I'm skeptical, but what do I know? I own The Pitt DLC on a damn disc.