But even so, one person pirating the game instead of buying it on PS4 is bad for Square and it's bad for Sony. I'm just saying, this is the methodology these kinds of studios use.
In most publishers' eyes, it's better to not even give gamers the option to pirate until it's absolutely necessary or until sales are slowing down. That's why Ubisoft's PC ports are always late.
Sure, but Square Enix has shown to be enthusiastic of handling their PC ports well (Just Cause 2, Sleeping Dogs & such) and it being a successful approach. If they can do that with their western games, why not Japanese ones? Those are, after all, the ones that really need the expansion of userbase the most given the current state of the genre.
It's not about seamlessness. It's about crashing into buildings and it looking patently ridiculous to fly an FF airship around Tokyo or New York City. If you fly through the city and hit a skyscraper, then just bounce harmlessly off of it, it breaks the "reality" Nomura is going for.
They could just limit it so that there's a kind of invisible barrier of how close to the cities you can fly, so you could fly over them but not go all Al Qaeda on the skyscrapers.
That being said, I don't see how a world designed like FFXII's would even work with a full seamless world map, seeing as you literally only see very small, distinct pieces of a very large world during the course of the game.
Why couldn't they do it like any other open-world game? They could limit it to one mega-continent (that wouldn't ACTUALLY be the size of a continent, but big enough to satisfy on a gameplay level) + smaller islands around it and simply have a "no fly-zone" after you reach too far to the sea, where the crew will be all like "we've come too far, let's turn back" and then the game does an auto 180 degrees. I mean Elder Scrolls games have "big cities" which have something, like, four buildings, yet people don't really complain about that much, so I think FFXV should be able to get away with having a big continent that wouldn't necessarily be that much of an continent in the real world, but still sizable enough that it offers plenty of exploration.
If XV's world is supposed to be a full planet, letting you fly all around it but limiting where you can actually land solely to places where the story takes place makes no sense.
Is it, though? I don't think Nomura has ever said so (he's just implied the scale of the world is huge and before it wasn't completely seamless) and only having five kingdoms certainly feels kind of small if you compare it to Earth having close to 200 countries. I feel like they might take an FFXII like approach where the war only takes place within one part/continent of the world. And that could be made to work, but of course then you wouldn't be able to go around the world (but really, is that at all important?)
They don't have the resources to model an entire planet and make all of it explorable, which is what would have to happen if the airship control is seamless with the normal game world. It would also break the reality of the setting if you're flying over the ocean and suddenly hit an invisible wall because the developers ran out of budget.
Which is why they are quite likely not even hoping to make a full planet, but only a part of it.
The only way it conceivably makes sense to make a fully controllable airship is if it's done Lost Odyssey-style, and even then the world would have to be a lot smaller than we might think. Airships and 3D open world games simply do not mix.
They do mix perfectly well, but they do require a somewhat massive world and it's not quite the same as having a full planet.
Nomura already said that the game is designed so there are no loading times between cities and fields - the transition is entirely seamless. I don't think it's possible to have airships usable in fields but not towns unless the airship map is different from the on-foot map.
Ah, okay, but they could just set the kind of limitations I gave. You probably couldn't land in cities then, but had to go to their outskirts.
