The development of Final Fantasy XVI is delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic

The RPG game Final Fantasy XVI produced by Square Enix was originally scheduled to release the latest information in 2021, however, its producer Naoki Yoshida recently published a very long open letter stating that the game development progress has been delayed by about half a year due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it can only be postponed to sometime between March and June 2022.

In the letter, Naoki Yoshida admitted that the team could not fulfill his original promise and apologized to the player for this. The development of Final Fantasy XVI is carried out by multiple studios around the world, but the huge development team is subject to the COVID-19 pandemic. Developers can only work from home most of the time, which affects communication and the progress is uneven.

Naoki Yoshida said that the development team spent a lot of time in 2021 to solve the work problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and hopes that the impact can be minimized next year so that they can concentrate on completing the tasks at hand, including improving the combat mechanism, perfecting individual combat, completing cutscenes, and optimizing overall graphics, etc.

Final Fantasy XVI is the orthodox sequel of Square Enix’s classic RPG game Final Fantasy series. It is only available on the PlayStation 5 platform on the console, and it should also appear on the PC platform in the future.