Xenoblade 3 devs on the huge amount of content, total walkable area over five times larger than Xenoblade 2
The developers of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 have weighed in on the huge amount of content that the RPG offers. Monolith Soft’s Tetsuya Takahashi and Koh Kojima, along with Nintendo’s Genki Yokota, weighed in on the topic.
Yokota said at one point that “the amount of content exceeds that of the first and second titles.” Additionally, Kojima mentioned that “the total walkable area in this game is over five times larger than in the second title.”
Here’s the full excerpt of the discussion:
The Xenoblade Chronicles series seems to have quite a lot of content. So, you decide on this to a certain degree at the beginning and then start making the product.
Takahashi: I think the feeling of “having a lot of content” differs from person to person, but ultimately I like having an abundance of content.
Yokota: I also like having a large volume of content!
Takahashi: Kojima-san always asks me to reduce the volume. (Laughs)
Yokota: I had to find the middle ground from my position, too.
Takahashi: As a genre, RPGs require a certain volume of content, and there is a minimum amount of content required to play. I think this is the result of first ensuring that minimum volume and then adding on “I want to do this” and “I want to do that.”
So you are saying that the development staff at MONOLITHSOFT is receptive to increasing the volume of content?
Kojima: No… I don’t think that’s the case… (Laughs)
Everyone: (Laughs)
Kojima: However, because of my position, I would say, “Please reduce the volume,” but in the end, I love having an abundance of content too. Besides, those of us in charge of landscapes and quests also love having a lot of content. In other words, the volume of content inevitably increases because the people who are making the game are all volume oriented. However, the volume isn’t increased indiscriminately, but rather out of necessity. In order to create the world that Takahashi-san wanted to depict and make it convincing, we had to incorporate a certain amount of content. If it was a movie, you could condense it into two hours and depict a compelling world. But with a game, you can freely explore the world to a certain extent. The areas characters traverse need to be large, and if there is a war going on there, it is necessary to incorporate a setting that includes the kind of people who normally live there and how they go about their daily lives. That’s why when we create all those things, the volume naturally increases.
So, everyone at MONOLITHSOFT likes having an abundance of content, don’t they?
Takahashi: I believe that is true. (Laughs) However, even though we say “abundance of content,” it covers a lot of things, and I would say the volume of content created in the Xenoblade Chronicles series is the volume of “idea content.” We sift through the content to figure out what volume is deemed essential for an RPG that can also be conveyed easily to our players. For example, let’s say that we focus on the details of a map and character, and create many variations or context-specific animations. I think players would enjoy it even so, but eventually they would stop noticing it after, say, 30 minutes of playing the game. We always ask ourselves if there are any other ways to achieve greater satisfaction for players, and upon exploring and devising many ideas we ultimately decide the appropriate volume of content.
Kojima: …Well, I think Takahashi-san would like to have countless map and character variations, to tell the truth. (Laughs)
Everyone: (Laughs)
Yokota: It’s about where you set your priorities, right? As this title links the worlds of the first two titles in the series – although we couldn’t have as much content as those combined – we understood that a proportional volume of content would be necessary as the series’ third iteration. As a result… I think the amount of content exceeds that of the first and second titles. (Laughs) Even for the scenario, I was planning to make it a little less than the second title, but I wanted to include various types of gameplay, not only in the main story but also during detours. So, I packed in what I wanted to do, and as a result, it ended up having slightly more content.
Kojima: Well… I’d like this third entry to be the last one with such a large volume of content!
But didn’t you think that for the second title as well?
Kojima: Well, yes… That’s right. (Laughs) Come to think of it, we were just talking about this yesterday in the office. That the world would be crazy big for this title. So I actually did the math, and it turns out that the total walkable area in this game is over five times larger than in the second title. It was like… “Yikes!” (Laughs)
Everyone: (Laughs)
Kojima: We mentioned the variety of maps and characters earlier, but to be able to create such a large area with a limited variation in landscapes naturally, I think that MONOLITHSOFT has accumulated a range of expertise in map creation. For example, it would be easy to create variations in the landscape by preparing a myriad of textures, but we tried to be creative in a different way. In fact, there are many colonies where you can explore and enjoy quests, and if we put too much effort into adding a lot of detailed variations such as wall patterns, I think we would not have been able to provide as much gameplay as we did.
Yokota: We did have a talk about wanting to increase the number of towns from the beginning, so I am glad that we were able to put our heads together to achieve this.
Takahashi: Also, having to express huge colonies called Ferronis and having “Ouroboros” – characters five to six meters tall – battle simultaneously required a certain amount of space.
Yokota: Ferronis are really huge, so I hope players will gaze up at them when they’re out exploring. Sometimes I wonder where the Ferronis is, and I look up and always think, “Wow! It’s so huge!” It still surprises me. (Laughs)
Takahashi: You can see the colonies, with the Ferronis at their center, from a great distance. And it’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?
Yokota: This is exactly where the sense of “Xenoblade-ness” comes in, so I hope everyone will take a look at it.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3 launches for Switch tomorrow, July 29.
