Those who are playing today: Was it worth the wait?

[Aulayna]

I'd argue that all of those scenes were still pretty much just concepts of what they plan might happen in the game.

So basically, it's what the writers would start with and decide on the story from there, even scrapping many of those initial concepts. Except this time, they announced it before even workshopping it. That's the crucial difference. Hence my earlier comparison - had the same thing happened to VII, people would have been upset that we didn't get that original game where it was just Cloud, Aerith and Barret, and "who the hell is this lame childhood friend chick? She's sexist as hell! This story was way better until they went and changed it"

Sure, but they still dropped characters even after the game was rebranded to FFXV. From the background image of EoFF alone, which is a promotional image released as part of the E3 2013 press kit (so not even that long ago), 3 of the 4 characters aren't even in the game at all and the 1 of that is barely features for more than a few minutes screentime and a a few lines of dialogue. I can get behind the logic for stuff from 5+ years ago that was dropped, but stuff as recent as 3 years ago shows there was a pretty big shift, pretty recently, and it all coincides with when Tabata and the Type-0 team took over the project full time. We know from interviews with Nomura and Tabata that Versus XIII was around 25% done before it was rebranded to FFXV and targetted for PS4/Xone instead of PS3. 25% is pretty past the concept stage.

As dubious as the GameFAQs post is, it's pretty obvious that the game went through some big changes as a result of the change of director and outsourcing of some elements so there may be some truth (again especially taking the NeoGAF post into account too) in some of the rumours. After they already wasted time and resources on getting a project to 25% over 7 years, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that time and resources were spent cutting the scale down and re-writing/re-working to make the scope more manageable.

Either way, we'll probably never know so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Again, as I said in another thread, I don't necessarily think Nomura's version would've been any better, and I thoroughly enjoyed what we got.

While I agree that the last stages of the story clearly weren't up to scratch (particularly the parts highlighted by Aulayna in this thread or another or something - basically post Levi, pre-final boss), I have to say the postgame experience has been fantastic so far compared to other entries. I have spent a lot of time doing various things, am one trophy away from Platinum Trophy now and more notably still have buckets of content I have yet to even touch, which is allegedly notably tougher than anything I've yet done.

Pretty sure it's also the first game I've ever maxed out my characters at L99, MMOs and XIII excepted (since in XIII there aren't really levels).

Yeah, the post-game stuff is fantastic. Probably the best offering in a main-numbered title in quite some time. (SPOILER)I would've loved to have had optional fights with Cerberus, Ultros or Diamond Weapon from Kingsglaive though.