‘I felt that rather than spread our effort across a breadth of things, we’d rather concentrate everything on the story’
Not every game needs to be open world. Although open world projects have been around for a long while, in recent years we’ve seen publishers take things to the extreme (Ubisoft, most notably) — to the point where nearly every one of their games [as a service] needs to be open to some capacity. But Dragon Quest XI isn’t going that route; according to creator Yuji Horii in an interview with EDGE, it’s for a few separate reasons.
Speaking to EDGE, Horii explains that a lot of work goes into developing all of the facets of an open world, using fishing as an example. Instead, Horii explains, “I felt that rather than spread our effort across a breadth of things, we’d rather concentrate everything on the story. I felt that was a much better use of our time.” He also notes that there’s an obvious practical cost to making something so open — “If you’re going for a completely open world, there’s obviously a development cost attached to that, affecting where you spend your time and effort.”
As a reminder, Dragon Quest XI is the first non-MMO mainline Dragon Quest since 2009, and the first console mainline Dragon Quest since 2004. It’s absolutely in the team’s interest to craft the best JRPG they can within their means.
May issue [Edge via Video Games For Life]
