A recent interview with Kingdom Hearts 3's game director has shed some light on what took the game so long to release, as well as whther we can expect DLC for them game.
Kingdom Hearts 3's game director, Tetsuya Nomura, spoke at length during a group interview (noted by GameSpot) on a number of aspects of Kingdom Hearts 3, but one of the most interesting parts of the interview focuses on what is taking the game so darn long to release!
“A lot of people have been mentioning and making it sound like ‘Oh, Nomura’s taking too much time,’ and it hurts."
Nomura went on to detail that a decision had been made to switch Kingdom Hearts 3 to Unreal Engine 4, which caused the team to have to work on aspects of the game all over again. On top of that, the "internal personnel is very limited" and there are lots of projects occurring within the company which further added to the prolonged period of no Kingdom Hearts 3.
“There was a decision made to change to an external [engine]…Unreal Engine 4. So we switched over to that. Unfortunately, there was a bit of time that needed to be rewinded and started over. So there was a bit of a setback there, but it was a decision that the company had to make, so it was inevitable.
“We had a plan of the period that it’s going to take for us to create the content at the start of the project, and we laid out, after such and such years, we would need to add more personnel resources. We had submitted it to our headquarters and had it approved, but internal personnel is very limited, and there are various different projects that happen within our company, so, unfortunately, timing did not work out. So we had to make due with the timing that was appropriate for the company…the company makes the decisions, so unfortunately sometimes it is out of my control.”
The game director emphasized that there is no problem within the development team and the timing between Kingdom Hearts 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3 was due to company decisions, not the team.
"I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t a problem on our development teams. It just happened that way, and there were some decisions that the company had to make, and it just didn’t work out for certain timings that we were hoping to hit.
“It’s kind of out of my hands. I mean, yes, time has passed. But it’s out of my hands.”
On top of that, Nomura detailed that there's a chance we will be seeing DLC for Kingdom Hearts 3, but they aren't ready to talk about that.
"I don’t think we’ll be keeping any worlds secret until the game is released. I think we will be introducing them leading up to launch. Nowadays games can add content on after the fact through DLC content, so there’s no need to hide any worlds.
“Nothing is set in stone, and I’m afraid we can’t go into details, but I have told the team: Just be prepared to be able to accommodate for something like that. We can’t suddenly develop a system where we’re accommodating for downloadable content. So it’s not confirming or denying either way, but just so that the development team will be prepared, I have informed them of making the preparations.”
The interview carries on a bit more on the worlds and developing the game for current consoles, so check it out in full on GameSpot.
Kingdom Hearts 3 will release in 2018 on Xbox One and PS4, you can check out a brand new gameplay trailer featuring the cast of Toy Story by clicking here. On top of that, you can read Nomura's take on porting Kingdom Hearts 3 to the Switch here.
