Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
Often long development times mean that they just didn't have a sweet clue where to take something. Unless you're Valve anyway (although I do believe that happens with Valve, they've at least always been smart enough to not release a game until they were happy with it). At this point, honestly, I'm not convinced that the team ever really had much direction which is kind of odd for a Nomura title. He seems like the only one getting anything done usually. Then again, maybe there were rampant technical issues or something, or perhaps they got overly ambitious with early ideas. So many things can, and probably have, gone wrong with SE's bigger titles.

And I actually had seen that trailer Nirojan. I thought it came out before last year though. Am I crazy or was that Youtube video uploaded after it was released?
It was the 2010 TGS trailer actually.

My feeling is that Versus XIII is probably dealing with the initial issue that XII suffered from, which was that the vision for the game design was so overly ambitious that most of the game's development time has been in R&D trying to make the vision plausible on current hardware. XII's open world was hindered because the Ivalice Team didn't want to force players to use the Sony Hard drive attachment like XI. So they had to figure out a way to make massive expansive world on the PS2 from scratch. If you read the early interviews for the type of stuff Nomura wanted Versus XIII to do, he's basically taking the stuff in XII and taking it to the next level.

Of course, I also feel that Versus XIII is being slowed down in it's production cause the team is most likely developing new ideas to implement throughout production. Partly cause they feel it will make a better game but I also wouldn't be surprised if the feedback from fans on other FF titles is also shaping it. So it's possible that it's actually the feedback from fans that are making Versus XIII be in development limbo while SE uses the XIII trilogy to gauge what fans want, and then put it into Versus XIII. This is of course pure speculation.