23rd December 2015, 6:44 AM
It's a bit more open world than that. It's true there's a linear story. This isn't something like Fallout. However, once you open up the world map, the world's your's to explore and, within the confines of the story, you're free to go to entire continents and such. One of my favorite bits of this is parts of the story that say "we've got no time to lose, we need to get to Juno and stop them from shipping that cannon!", at which point I take a few weeks off to breed chocobos and travel the world, doing side quests and getting rare items and such.
This was true of every Final Fantasy up to and including 9. In Final Fantasy 1, for example, you can do most of the dungeons out of order, find the air ship early, and just go wherever. Final Fantasy 6 is linear right up until the part where you pick a scenario after the river, then it opens up more. The world of ruin is completely open once you get the airship back, open in the sense of a Fallout game in fact. Open world isn't some brand new concept after all, older games had it a lot more than many give it credit for. 10 changed all that when they started the annoying "tube quest" trend, which was as linear as you say.
If they went episodic, they'd have to basically include the entire last game IN the new episode if they wanted to be sure it kept that more open nature. Barring that, there's a lot that's going to be lost and it may end up being as I feared, a "tube quest" version of FF7.
This was true of every Final Fantasy up to and including 9. In Final Fantasy 1, for example, you can do most of the dungeons out of order, find the air ship early, and just go wherever. Final Fantasy 6 is linear right up until the part where you pick a scenario after the river, then it opens up more. The world of ruin is completely open once you get the airship back, open in the sense of a Fallout game in fact. Open world isn't some brand new concept after all, older games had it a lot more than many give it credit for. 10 changed all that when they started the annoying "tube quest" trend, which was as linear as you say.
If they went episodic, they'd have to basically include the entire last game IN the new episode if they wanted to be sure it kept that more open nature. Barring that, there's a lot that's going to be lost and it may end up being as I feared, a "tube quest" version of FF7.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)