Quote Originally Posted by Fynn View Post
I don't think they did. XV was just planned as an ARPG from the start since it was Nomura's pet project, and considering Nomura's... oeuvre (KH), you can tell he's pretty into the sub genre. Hence why VII is going this way.
Yeah it's pretty much this. FFXV is really Versus which was always an ARPG. If Versus never existed then I bet FFXV would retain some ATB aspects. I don't think they ever decided to abandon ATB, it was just that they had this other ARPG game in development hell and they decided to rebrand it as FFXV.

Going forward, though, I would not be surprised if they abandoned it in the main franchise considering the success of FFXV and general RPG trends. I hope not, because ATB was a great battle system, especially when they perfected it in FFX-2.