The Final Fantasy XV that was rumored over the weekend is real.
If you’ve been chomping at the bit to get your hands on Final Fantasy XV, your wait just got a couple of months longer. There have been rumblings throughout the weekend that a delay was coming, specifically a leaked photo posted to Gamnesia of instructions sent to GameStop employees to change the date on in-store promotional materials.
This morning, a YouTube video was posted to the official Final Fantasy 15 channel featuring game director Hajime Tabata. In that video, Tabata confirms the delay (The video is in Japanese, but is annotated with an English translation) In it, he says that the team has “completed the master version, but when it comes to that highest possible quality, we felt that we had not quite reached this standard yet.”
He then goes on to explain that they want to the experience to be of the best quality for all players, which means including the day one patch on the disc for all purchasers.
Finally, Tabata confirms the delay, saying in part,
“We held a presentation in March and announced that Final Fantasy XV would have a simultaneous worldwide release on the 30th of September. I am very sorry, but I must ask for just a little more time to polish our game up some more.
We are changing the release date of Final Fantasy XV to the 29th of November 2016.”
While two months isn’t horrifically long delay, it’s worth noting that it will push the game’s release past Black Friday (which is November 25 this year), typically one of the dates that games try to hit in an effort to garner stronger physical sales as part of the rush of holiday shopping beginning. Whether or not that has any effect on the game’s sales remains to be seen.
