FFXVI is being made by a different team to the teams that made the FFXIII trilogy (Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama), FFXIV ARR (Naoki Yoshida), and FFXV (Hajime Tabata). The team making FFXVI is most definitely being led by Hiroyuki Ito and likely has a current headcount of around 200-300 people. The headcount is the combined total of the FFXII team, Tactics Ogre PSP team, and The Last Remnant team.
What is the development history of FFXVI?
Evidence I've amassed points to game beginning planning in Q1 2008, around half a year after FFXII IZJS released in August 2007. Ito led the planning and the team was exclusively composed of people that worked on FFXII, who were also working on Tactics Ogre PSP concurrently. In Q1 2009, after a year of planning for FFXVI (which was still known as FFXV at the time), The Last Remnant team were merged with the FFXII/Tactics Ogre PSP team in order to help develop the game. Their inclusion sped up the pre-production phase, as they were already familiar with developing for HD consoles.
By Q1/Q2 2010, a vertical slice of FFXVI was running on PS3/Xbox 360 hardware. However, the development team found it difficult to get the gameplay and battle system Ito wanted running on the current-gen hardware due to insufficient RAM and CPU clock speed. As a result, Ito began to make concessions and started to cut many of his ideas. However, while he was doing this and early development of FFXVI continued, a catastrophic event occurred in September 2010: FFXIV released to critical and commercial failure.
The fallout from the FFXIV debacle was devastating. In an attempt to salvage the MMORPG, Yoichi Wada greatly reduced the headcount working on FFXVI (still known as FFXV at the time) and moved the staff over to FFXIV to help remake the game from the ground up. This is why you see so many FFXII, Tactics Ogre PSP, and The Last Remnant staff in the credits of FFXIV ARR; many were moved over to help remake the game. It was smart move by Wada, as he didn't want to release the next mainline FF (Ito's game) when the preceding one had been a critical and commercial failure.
Considering that Ito had lost almost all of his staff, he went back to the drawing board for FFXVI and began streamlining his gameplay ideas so it could run smoothly on PS3/Xbox 360. However, in January 2011, Wada decided to rename VersusXIII to FFXV, as there was no way he thought Ito could get the real FFXV finished and released for the approaching end of the current console generation, especially seeing as he’d moved most of Ito's staff over to FFXIV and they were still busy trying to completely remake the game.
Therefore, VersusXIII became FFXV and planned to be a cross-gen game (PS3 and PS4). But, in July 2012, Wada felt it was too little too late for current-gen and that FFXV should be next-gen exclusive. He then added the Type-0 team to the FFXV team and made Hajime Tabata the Co-Director. For reference, FF Type-0 was released in October 2011, so the entire dev team were not tied to any major project when they were added to the FFXV team. Also, in July 2012, Wada told Ito to no longer bother attempting to make his game try to fit the limitations of current-gen and that his game will now be released as FFXVI for PS4/Xbox One. This must have been a relief for Ito, as he finally had the RAM and CPU clock speed to work with that PS3/Xbox 360 were lacking. As a result, he returned to his original plans for the game and began to add even more in-depth gameplay mechanics to his original ideas. That was in August 2012.
So where does FFXVI stand right now?
When FFXIV ARR was finished and finally released in August 2013, which is one year after Wada told Ito that his game was now FFXVI for PS4/Xbox One, many of the FFXII, Tactics Ogre PSP, and The Last Remnant team members were given back to Ito. By this point, Ito had already spent an entire year in the planning phase of FFXVI for PS4/Xbox One, so the staff that rejoined could immediately jump straight into the pre-production phase. However, some FFXII, Tactics Ogre PSP, and The Last Remnant staff now also had major roles on FFXIV ARR and its future patches and expansions. For example, Hiroshi Minagawa was Co-Director of FFXVI (then known as FFXV) as far back as Q1 2008, when the project first started, but he was among the staff that Wada moved over to FFXIV to help completely remake the game. As it stands, Minagawa is multi-tasking as Lead UI Designer on FFXIV ARR and Co-Director on FFXVI. This is only but one example, as there are other FFXII, Tactics Ogre PSP, and The Last Remnant staff that are also multi-tasking both games.
As of typing this, it's September 2014, which means that FFXVI has been in development for PS4/Xbox One for just over two years. The first year was planning by Ito, while the second year was pre-production by the FFXII, Tactics Ogre PSP, and The Last Remnant team members, who all returned to FFXVI after finishing their work on developing FFXIV ARR. I wouldn't be surprised if FFXVI is already up and running in Luminous Studio and in a basic playable state. That's not to say it's nearly finished, but rather that the game’s much further along than most people think. This is likely due to just how much time Ito has spent in the planning phase for this project and also how long it has been in and out of pre-production since the project started in Q1 2008.
When will FFXVI be announced?
They could announce it at E3 2016 if they wanted, as that will be not long after FFXV likely releases in Q4 2015 for Japan and Q1 2016 in NA/EU. However, my main bet is the game will be announced as part of the Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary in 2017. Considering FFXVI is being made by Ito and the FFXII team, I'm sure a FFXII HD Remaster announcement will happen before they make their FFXVI announcement.
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