You wait ages for Final Fantasy 16 news and then two bits come along at once. Such is the nature of the cycle. In a live stream today about an upcoming collaboration between the Nier Reincarnation mobile game and Final Fantasy 14, producer Naoki Yoshida stopped by and dropped some hints on how FF16 is doing.
Brought to us by well-known Twitter translator Audrey Lamsam, Yoshida implied the trailer had been done for a while (we’d heard similar from various sources) but that factors had delayed it being shown. To minorly translate that from game dev speak to likely real world: marketing, production, or executive management decided the game wasn’t going to come out for a little while longer and didn’t want to build the hype too early. That or they felt a particular period was already too packed with news and information.
Yoshida went on to say that they’ve been working hard on bug-fixing and polishing, which is still ongoing, but that the game is approaching a finished state. He also complained to Yosuke Saito, Nier-series producer and regular trouble maker on livestreams, that he was making him talk about FF16 again – this isn’t the first time an unrelated stream has resulted in news for the game.
Since you’re here for a trailer, here’s what they released at the event, detailing the Reincarnation X FF14 crossover that’s happening in May. The FF14 side of this is yet to be announced. Community speculation suggests that a few items added in the most recent patch are likely all that’s coming. There was a full raid series based on Nier just one expansion ago.
We’d expect this mysterious FF16 trailer to appear at some point between now and the end of Geoff Keighley’s not-E3, Summer Game Fest, perhaps even as part of the main show there. The game itself? Late this year or early next is your safe bet.
If your Japanese is better than mine you can scrub through the full archive of the livestream here. Yoshida shows up around the 40 minute mark.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
