When a game takes ten years to develop, it's typically a sign of moving goalposts. In
Duke Nukem Forever's case, this took the form of constant engine changes, which led to delays long enough that assets needed recreated to stay acceptably modern. This, of course, was often followed by the availability of new engines and an unwillingness of the project's management to release on an older engine.
Final Fantasy XV seems to have had the same problem and more. First, staff got pulled from the project to work on
Final Fantasy XIII, thus causing stagnation. This is bad management example 1. They should not have announced the game at a point where they weren't even ready to commit a full team to work on it. After that, there was an engine change to support the open worlds the game was intended to have. This is bad management example 2. An open world game should never have been greenlit on an engine designed for smaller. Then in early 2011 Square Enix saw the PS4 and decided to change platforms. This is bad management example 3. A tremendous amount of work needed redone to bring it to the new console generation. This was a colossal waste of man-hours... though not as bad as it could have been, as it was revealed in July 2011 that the game wasn't even in full production yet.
This brings me to the next TWO examples of management screwing things up. The game had been announced in 2006 yet apparently was not being treated with any kind of priority. In fact, in 2012 when it was internally renamed from
Final Fantasy Versus XIII to
Final Fantasy XV (though this wouldn't be announced for another year), six years after its announcement, more than two-thirds of the way through its eventual final development period, it was
only 25% complete. The project had been backburnered for its first five years since reveal and only in that last year had it seen any real progress. So bad management example 4: The game should never have been revealed as early as it was.
Example 5 is that letting the project remain in development at a slow pace for those first five years eventually brought about a complete throwing away of any man-hours invested before the project was reworked. If it had gotten proper staffing and attention in the first place, it would have been finished in time for a PS3 release to make sense. By only assigning a skeleton team not big enough to finish the project in a reasonable period of time, they all but guaranteed it would eventually need to move platforms. This was also what caused them not to notice for
four years that the game's engine wouldn't cut it. This was one monstrously bad decision which begat several more. They literally would have been better off not to work on it at all, and not to announce it when they did.
And then there's example 6, my final example, of how bad management has screwed up
Final Fantasy XV. That is the name itself. With the name change, both externally and internally, came a change in what the game was even meant to be. Though still part of
Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy, it now needed to be able to justify itself as a main-series game and not as a spin-off. This led to major story/content changes, most obviously the replacement of the character Stella with Luna.
Ultimately, the game that will come out this November is not the result of ten years of development. It is the result of four years of development, along with six years of wastefulness. The problems in this game's dev cycle are fairly well documented. You certainly do
not need to have worked for Square Enix to see them; you just need to read interviews. They pretty openly admit to their mistakes, which is awfully easy when you consider the company's higher-ups don't even understand that these were mistakes. I don't want to diminish the hard work of the artists and programmers who worked on this game. They've put in their all, and by the looks of things, done a decent job. However, between a constantly moving target and inadequate dev resources for much of its existence, it never stood a chance of going right, and there is nobody that can possibly be blamed except management.
All that being said, I did really enjoy what time I spent with the "Platinum Demo" earlier this year, and I have high hopes for the actual game. As much of a slap in the face as a delay is after such a protracted development period, it does seem like the current team is giving it their all and really wants not only to release this, but to produce something good. Whether they'll succeed is another matter entirely, but progress over the past four years seems to have been far more substantial than anything before it. This shift is a good sign to me.
As an aside, I have noticed in my research (yes, this post required research; if I was going to tell this story right and make my point adequately I needed to make sure my facts were straight) that the vast majority of real progress seems to have been since Hajime Tabata took over as director. Considering how quickly other Square Enix projects such as
Final Fantasy XIII-2 and
Final Fantasy XV have moved, and how slowly other Nomura-led projects such as
Kingdom Hearts 3 have moved, there is a distinct possibility that Tetsuya Nomura is simply incompetent and dragging the whole company down with him. I get the distinct impression the company gives him a lot of freedom and overlooks a lot of nonsense from him as some sort of revered name, presumably due to having been attached to several of their most successful products such as
Final Fantasy VII and
Kingdom Hearts. I'm glad to see him no longer working on FFXV, and in fact his absence from the project for the past four years gives me more hope for it than anything else I've heard surrounding it.
